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To: Swordmaker
Actually the Company has a point. The DMCA law says circumvent means "to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid,bypass, remove, deactivate or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner."

Vista, OSX, DVD players etc. do make it possible to bypass the technological measures. This company probably has a Patented and Copyrighted scheme to prevent the bypassing. I don't see how a judge could rule against the suit.

The law is clear, it is just bad law.

12 posted on 05/12/2007 6:43:31 AM PDT by LeGrande (Muslims, Jews and Christians all believe in the same God of Abraham.)
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To: LeGrande

Are you a copyright attorney? What scrambled or encrypted work are these defendants accused of bypassing/circumventing? Further, if there is some sort of unscrambling/encrypting that is being bypassed - is the plaintiff the copyright owner of the scrambling/encryption scheme to begin with?

And even at that, I believe the plaintiff would have to be able to prove that these defendants actually reverse-engineered the plaintiff’s technology - which is not what it sounds as if they are accusing the defendants of...


17 posted on 05/12/2007 8:21:16 AM PDT by TheBattman (I've got TWO QUESTIONS for you....)
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To: LeGrande
Actually the Company has a point. The DMCA law says circumvent means "to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid,bypass, remove, deactivate or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner."

Vista, OSX, DVD players etc. do make it possible to bypass the technological measures. This company probably has a Patented and Copyrighted scheme to prevent the bypassing. I don't see how a judge could rule against the suit.

As the artile says, that sill depend on how broadly the court interprets the term "bypass." Suppose, by way of analogy, an FM radio station decides one day that it should only be available to subscribers. It still transmits in the open on the FM band, so instead of encrypting it, the company decides to sue the manufacturers for not adopting its protective measures and building its encryption and subscription product into their receivers.

If the audio streams are in a format that Windows Media, Quicktime, Real, etc. can play, but with added data from this company's proprietary protection scheme -- if it isn't part of the published standard -- the companies aren'y bypassing it, they're just not implementing it.

25 posted on 05/12/2007 4:40:42 PM PDT by ReignOfError (`)
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To: LeGrande

If they get traction, I’m writing a DRM scheme really quick and suing too.


30 posted on 05/12/2007 5:38:16 PM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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