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:: 5.15.2003 ::
:: The digital copyright wars: an update ::
From CNET News.com:
DVD-copying case heads to court
By Lisa M. Bowman
The latest major clash between technology and copyright owners heads to federal court Thursday, where software start-up 321 Studios hopes to win a reprieve from a legal attack by film companies on its DVD-copying software.
The case, which will be heard in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, holds important consequences not only for software developers and for the motion picture industry but also for consumers, who face increasingly complex rules governing the uses of entertainment products.
Seven major movie studios are seeking to stop St. Louis-based 321 from shipping its DVD X-Copy and DVD Copy Plus programs, claiming the software violates a controversial copyright law banning the sale of products that can crack copyright protection measures.
While most DVDs include anticopying features as a shield against piracy, 321 essentially contends that consumers should be allowed to get around those measures in certain cases--for example, when they make personal back-up copies of legally purchased material.
At stake is the scope of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has been wielded by the entertainment industry to crack down on several technologies that make it easier to copy and distribute digital material.
Legal experts said the case is one of the more thorny DMCA showdowns because the judge is being asked to clarify something that other cases have not--whether the law prevents all circumvention or whether there are cases in which circumvention is legal.
"That's a big open issue that this will help define," said Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property lawyer at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich. "This is one of the first tough cases" to address this issue.
posted by me
:: 11:13:00 AM [+] ::
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