[FYI] (Fwd) DVD depositions story/E-Commerce Law Weekly

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Wed, 5 Jul 2000 15:40:53 -0400
Send reply to:  	Law & Policy of Computer Communications
             	<CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
From:           	Mike Godwin <mnemonic@WELL.COM>
Subject:        	DVD depositions story/E-Commerce Law Weekly
To:             	CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

My story on the depositions of Jack Valenti and Kenneth Jacobsen of
MPAA is now available at the law.com website.

The URL is
<http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=l
aw/View&c=Article&cid=ZZZ94KS94AC&live=true&cst=1&pc=5&pa=0&s=News&Exp
Ignore=true&showsummary=0> .

(Sorry about that.)

Here's the opening of the article:

DVD Depositions Suggest MPAA Had
Little Evidence of 'Irreparable Harm'

Depositions contain a lot of "I don't know's"

Mike Godwin
E-Commerce Law Weekly
July 5, 2000


Published deposition testimony from top
officials at the Motion Picture Association of
America in a federal lawsuit strongly suggests
that neither they nor others in the
movie-industry trade association are aware of
any piracy of DVD movies resulting from the
publication to the Web late last year of the
DeCSS decryption utility.

The DeCSS utility -- a piece of software that
unscrambles DVD-movie content that has been
scrambled by the movie industry's Content
Scramble System -- potentially allows users to
copy content from a legitimate commercial DVD
movie to a computer hard-drive, from which it
can, at least in theory, be transmitted through
the Internet.

MPAA President Jack Valenti and the MPAA
vice president in charge of the organization's
global antipiracy efforts, Kenneth Jacobsen,
were deposed in June as witnesses in what has
become the most-watched case of the
DVD/DeCSS litigation -- Universal City Studios
Inc. v. Reimerdes (S.D.N.Y., CA No. 00 Civ.
277 (LAK)). The published deposition
transcripts for the case, in which several
passages labeled "confidential" are redacted
pursuant to a court-approved confidentiality
stipulation, appear to raise questions about the
MPAA's claims in current lawsuits that the
DeCSS utility is essentially a tool to facilitate
copyright infringement.

The transcripts also raise questions as to
whether the MPAA was justified in January when
it sought in federal court preliminary injunctions
against Web publishers who distributed or linked
to the DeCSS software utility, or to its source
code.

<Remainder of text snipped>



--Mike


--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
------ "I speak the password primeval .... I give the sign of
democracy ...."
            --Walt Whitman
Mike Godwin can be reached by phone at 202-223-7843.
His book, CYBER RIGHTS, can be ordered at
        http://www.panix.com/~mnemonic .
----------------------------------------------------------------------
------
------- End of forwarded message -------