Saturday, December 07, 2002

Court to rule on software that copies 'protected' DVDs. New Scientist Dec 7 2002 7:05AM ET [Moreover - Science news] Interesting case here The really interesting arguement here is that the copy protection scheme has a humogous loophole or design flaw ... the backups of movies are made at a point in the process when the copy protection scheme is non-functional, so nothing in fact is being spoofed.  The courts will have to rule on whether or not it is legal to exploit the stupidity of your adversaries. I thought copyright law made it legal for us to backup software, but did not make it a right, so that software companies were free to offer stuff that is impossible to backup. I thought copyright law with respect to software backups allowed multiple backups, but basically ruled that only one copy could actually be running ON THE COMPUTER with ONLY ONE USER per software license. This article implies that I thought wrong about that, and that we are back to the interpretation that loading software from CD Rom or diskette or Internet download is a violation of copyright law because we are COPYING it from the purchase media into our computer. I thought copyright law was a bit different for different kinds of media ... software, printed literature, music 1:05:51 PM

© Copyright 2003 Al Macintyre.