DVD CCA Preliminary Injunction Hearing Rescheduled

This came into my mailbox from drwiii this morning: 'The judge had a scheduling conflict this Friday, so he had to reschedule the Preliminary Injunction hearing for next Tues. PLEASE NOTE: The Preliminary Injunction Hearing is NOW set for Tuesday, January 18, 2000 at 13:30 (PST) at Santa Clara County Superior Court (Dept. 2).'

What can those of us too distant to attend do?

The subject says it all.

I and other are too far away to give any "on-site" support, but would like to help out if we can.

Aside from joining the EFF (done), what if anything can those of us too far away to attend the hearing do to help out?

Re:anyone verified this?

Re, the worries about "bad nerds"--

We pretty much impressed everyone there at the TRO hearing--I'm dead serious, I don't think the staff at the courthouse had ever experienced such a courteous crowd. Bruce Perens had alot to do with this, as he guided us as a mass quite effectively, but everyone there deserves credit for giving the Linux community a good name.

In comparison, the plaintiffs pretty much walked in there like they owned the place, made arguments which were essentially "Not only did these guys post the code, but they were really really mean about it and made fun of us!", and talked about the hundreds of thousands of jobs the movie industry creates. There may have been less of them, but guess which group was more civil?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:DVD CCA case?

And they do have the right to control what formats the content they produce is distributed on. "Fair use" is for quoting and limited reproduction, not redistribution of the entire body of material.

So AvantGo, which converts websites(in as much detail as you like) to a lower quality, Palmpilot-viewable form is unfair use in your book?

Hell, what about recorders? They downshift a high quality NTSC signal to a degraded--but still viewable--form for extended storage. Sony v. Universal was pretty clear that this was OK. RIAA v. Diamond even went so far as to establish the right to space shift--I have a 10GB hard drive, and with transcoding I could probably put a half dozen movies onto my 2.5inch platters. Give me a minidisc size device with a 10gb hard drive and eyeglass displays, and suddenly I can carry a small chunk of my movie library in my pocket.

Who is the movie industry to tell me that I can't do that?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:DVD CCA case?

But DeCSS was not created for conversion to different formats. It was created as an offshoot from the development to produce a DVD player for Linux.

Whatever DVDCCA's concerns about piracy (or copyright theft as I prefer to call it), the law wasn't broken. DVDCCA is saying that DVD information was distributed only to allow copyright theft, if that were the case there would be a case to answer for, they are wrong.

Fair use includes reading/playing the DVD video that you have legally purchased in anyway that you wish. At least some, and I expect most, of the defendents (I am one, hence I'm posting anonymously) have no intention of breaking copyright law. I believe that copyright law is good and proper (some details could be changed though).

Information wants to be free, meaning that information has a tendency to spread and onces its out its pretty much impossible to stop. See the theory of memes [whatis.com]. That's why we have encryption and copyright. People have different views on this, but none of it matters to this case (IMHO).

In this case the encryption was very weak. The information avaliable is legal, it was not stolen and its not patented. Nobody that I am awear of is being prosecuted for copyright theft involoving the use of the DeCSS program.