Michael W. Ryan on Tue, 28 Dec 1999 17:32:00 -0500 (EST)


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Re: Is it apropos? (was: Re: [Plug] DVD people taking the hackers to court)


On Tue, 28 Dec 1999, Nicolai Rosen wrote:

> It doesn't matter if we agree with it, but it does matter that they're 
> trying to issue an injunction against somebody operating outside of the US. 
> They can't really do that unless they get an injunction in the other 
> country.

And if the injunction was delivered by a law firm of that company (as was
the case in Norway)?

> >The complaint does mention a suspected complicity of a licensee.  This
> >would then meant that the software was based on illegally obtained
> >information.
> 
> The information was obtained legally as in the country it was obtained, the 
> right to reverse engineer is protected, a protection that superseeds any 
> licenses to the contrary. Also, a license doesn't apply merely because you 
> open the box. If the person or people who reverse engineered the software to 
> strip out the keys never used it, then there would've been no reason for 
> them to agree to the license. That being said, I've always thought that the 
> idea of somebody agreeing to a license by clicking on a YES box or using the 
> software was a bit absurd. For all I know, that's not legally binding (as 
> well it shouldn't be) in the country it took place.

I'm not talking about an EULA.  I'm talking about a company that obtained
a license to produce DVD software.  If they provided material or data to a
third party to enable that party to decode the DVD data, the company would
be in violation of their license.

Michael W. Ryan, MCP, MCT     | OTAKON 2000
mryan@netaxs.com              | Convention of Otaku Generation
http://www.netaxs.com/~mryan/ | http://www.otakon.com/

PGP fingerprint: 7B E5 75 7F 24 EE 19 35  A5 DF C3 45 27 B5 DB DF
PGP public key available by fingering mryan@unix.netaxs.com (use -l opt)


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