[NTLUG:Discuss] MI2 boycott
Richard Cobbe
cobbe at directlink.net
Thu May 4 17:55:53 CDT 2000
Lo, on Thursday, 4 May, 2000, Gregory A. Edwards did write:
> Whether the intent of DeCSS is to copy, play, rerecord, or just to solve
> an interesting problem does not matter. An owned piece of property was
> reverse engineered and therefore stolen from its owners. No matter what
> law MPAA hangs the papers on this is really a case of theft of property.
IIRC, there are Supreme Court cases protecting the ability to reverse
engineer something on First Amendment grounds. So, no, I'm not really sure
it's all that clear-cut.
Or did AMD and Cyrix steal plans for the Pentium from Intel?
Did StarOffice (and others) steal the file format for Word from Microsoft?
And so forth.
> I don't know why MPAA won't license the rights to some company in the
> Linux community to do the drivers for DVD playback.
They have. See
http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=CoolFubWbq0DusdaWmG&FQ=Linux&Nav=na-search-&StoryTitle=Linux
I don't know that InterVideo is exactly in the Linux community, but in
March they announced plans to provide a software DVD viewer for Linux.
Closed-source, obviously; the MPAA won't let them do anything else.
I'd point out that this was not announced until well AFTER the lawsuits
started.
Richard
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