Re:interesting... (Score 1)

No, what the court said was that the injury in question was directed against a California company or institution which they have jurisdiction over and that this case meets the requirements necessary to have the case tried in California.

If you broke a California law but the harm wasn't directed at California(a resident etc.) than California would have no jurisdiction.

I'm a Canadian and not a lawyer but given the reasoning of the decision I don't see that the US Supreme Court will have grounds to overturn this decision.

Having said that, the decision could be vacated on other grounds. Obviously since I'm not a lawyer I don't know for sure but I'm presuming that any reverse engineering is illegal in California, otherwise there is no basis for this suit since the DeCSS source was legally reverse engineered. If it isn't illegal in Illinois to reverse engineer, in other words if this case has no basis in Illinois on it's face than this court erred in not finding for Pavlovich. Test 3) of the 7 criterion which the court must use in testing if the long arm statute applies, is whether California's laws are in conflict with the sovereignty of the laws of the other state in question, in this case Illinois. If it's not illegal to reverse engineer in Illinois than it is obvious that this case is in severe and direct conflict with the laws of Illinois which would mean that the long-arm statute could not apply.

The above analysis is for some reason based on the idea that the harm in question was supposedly done from Illinois if it wasn't than simply replace Illinois with the state in question.

If I was a US citizen what would really bother me is that none of the 7 tests used by the court refer to the interests or sovereignty of the federal government. In otherwords how can it be illegal to perform an action in a part of the country when that same action isn't illegal in the total of the country. Again I'm presuming there isn't a federal US law against reverse engineering.