FC: Text of appeals court's decision in MPAA vs. 2600 DMCA suit

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

The version of the opinion up on EFF and 2600 is barely readable. This one 
is larger but scanned from hardcopy:
http://vorlon.mit.edu/~declan/dmca/appeals.decision.112801.pdf

Says Chuck Sims, an attorney representing the MPAA member companies, as 
quoted in my article:
"The arguments against this law are preposterous. It's an EFF fund-raising 
operation. It's raised lots of money by hysterical attacks against this 
law. Four judges have looked at the challenges and said, 'There's no there 
there.'"

-Declan

---
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48726,00.html

   Copyright Law Foes Lose Big
   By Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   9:00 a.m. Nov. 29, 2001 PST

   WASHINGTON -- If there was a scorecard for copyright lawsuits, this
   week it would look like this: entertainment industry 2, free speech
   zip.

   On Wednesday, with a pair of federal courts siding with the music and
   record industry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lost two of its
   most important intellectual property cases so far.

   Programmers, hackers and open-source aficionados had pinned their
   hopes on these lawsuits as a way to eviscerate the Digital Millennium
   Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law loved by the entertainment and
   software industries almost as much as it's hated by computer
   professionals.

   Now, all of a sudden, repealing the reviled DMCA through First
   Amendment litigation seems altogether unlikely. Nor, given how much
   Washington politicians adore the law, is Congress likely to alter it.

   In its decision (PDF) on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of
   Appeals trashed the EFF's arguments, saying they were anything but
   convincing. The appeals panel ruled 3-0 to uphold an August 2000
   decision by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan that barred 2600 magazine
   from distributing a DVD-descrambling utility.

   [...]




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