DMCA Dealt Serious Blow By Sixth Circuit Appeals Court

KingFishKingFish
edited October 2004 in Science & Tech
Lexmark loses a precedent setting decision regarding the use of the DMCA and their chip embedded toner cartridges.
In a word, the appeal failed. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against Lexmark, and offered future guidance relating to the use of the DMCA. As you may recall, the DMCA is all about copyright, and it was Lexmark's (necessary) argument that their copyright was infringed upon by SCC when they reverse engineered the chip. The court, however, sided with the view that access controls are not typically eligible for copyright protection.
Source: Ars Technica

Comments

  • PreacherPreacher Potomac, MD Icrontian
    edited October 2004
    The logic behind the DMCA.....or lack thereof...continues to befuddle me.

    What I don't understand is how the MPAA got 321 Studios to stop selling DVDXCopy. Doesn't the DMCA allow one to make backups of legitimately owned copies? What's the difference from making a copy of a store bought music CD with Nero than making a copy of store bought DVD with DVDXCopy?
  • SputnikSputnik Worcester, MA
    edited October 2004
    if you bypass any security measure, you are breaking the DMCA, however you can reverse engineer for interoperabilities sake... seems contradictory at times, but the second clause seems to win out (thank god).

    The way that that MPAA shutdown 321 was simple a money issue. MPAA>321 in that department, and had any and every lawyer with a tinge of evil in them working for them.

    The second question is easy: NOTHING AT ALL! this is why the DMCA is sooo screwed up. In both cases, it's likely that you are breaking some kind of security, be it CSS (and how easy that is to crack) in the case of DVDs or the proprietary copy protection that CDs sometimes have.

    The DMCA has a few good points (honestly, the reverse engineering clause is simply amazing and is keeping Microsoft and AOL from attacking all the open source and little startups people who want to be interoperable with say Office and AIM), but most of it is extremely poorly and vaguely worded, as one would expect from the writers such that an ignorant (to the state of technology that is) congressman wouldn't understand the ramifications of their action of signing it into law.
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