FC: Text of appeals court's decision in MPAA vs. 2600 DMCA suit

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Thu Nov 29 2001 - 09:25:23 PST

  • Next message: Declan McCullagh: "FC: EFF replies to MPAA lawyer Chuck Sims over DeCSS loss"

    The version of the opinion up on EFF and 2600 is barely readable. This one 
    is larger but scanned from hardcopy:
    http://vorlon.mit.edu/~declan/dmca/appeals.decision.112801.pdf
    
    Says Chuck Sims, an attorney representing the MPAA member companies, as 
    quoted in my article:
    "The arguments against this law are preposterous. It's an EFF fund-raising 
    operation. It's raised lots of money by hysterical attacks against this 
    law. Four judges have looked at the challenges and said, 'There's no there 
    there.'"
    
    -Declan
    
    ---
    http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48726,00.html
    
        Copyright Law Foes Lose Big
        By Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
        9:00 a.m. Nov. 29, 2001 PST
    
        WASHINGTON -- If there was a scorecard for copyright lawsuits, this
        week it would look like this: entertainment industry 2, free speech
        zip.
    
        On Wednesday, with a pair of federal courts siding with the music and
        record industry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lost two of its
        most important intellectual property cases so far.
    
        Programmers, hackers and open-source aficionados had pinned their
        hopes on these lawsuits as a way to eviscerate the Digital Millennium
        Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law loved by the entertainment and
        software industries almost as much as it's hated by computer
        professionals.
    
        Now, all of a sudden, repealing the reviled DMCA through First
        Amendment litigation seems altogether unlikely. Nor, given how much
        Washington politicians adore the law, is Congress likely to alter it.
    
        In its decision (PDF) on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of
        Appeals trashed the EFF's arguments, saying they were anything but
        convincing. The appeals panel ruled 3-0 to uphold an August 2000
        decision by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan that barred 2600 magazine
        from distributing a DVD-descrambling utility.
    
        [...]
    
    
    
    
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