FC: DVD lawsuit judge complains about hackers, "cyber-anarchists"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

*******
A photo I took of everyone's favorite DeCSS judge:
http://www.wired.com/news/images/thumbs/kaplanthumb1116.jpg
*******

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40226,00.html

   DVD Piracy Judge Tells All
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)

   2:00 a.m. Nov. 17, 2000 PST
   WASHINGTON -- U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan doesn't truly dislike
   hackers and open-source programmers, not exactly.

   Kaplan, who sided with the motion picture industry in a landmark
   DVD-descrambling lawsuit this year, simply views them as lawless
   miscreants.

   To Kaplan, a 56-year-old jurist who once represented Time Warner as a
   lawyer in private practice, the coders who crafted the DeCSS
   DVD-decrypting utility are "what might be called cyber-freedom
   fighters, or perhaps cyber-anarchists."

   In August, Kaplan ruled that the DeCSS Windows program violated the
   Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and compared the spread of the
   application to a "common-source outbreak epidemic."

   [...]

   "Little did I know, when I was scribbling away, that (the) decision
   would receive so much attention," Kaplan said Thursday afternoon at a
   "Beyond Napster" symposium organized by American University's
   Washington College of Law.

   [...]




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