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Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
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------- 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.
(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 -------