David Gerard wrote:
On 04/05/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
The 2600 decision, according to the text of the decision, was almost entirely based on the fact that 2600 was explicitly "trafficking" in circumvention tools, since it was pretty much a "hey download this tool here!" type of link. The court took great pains to note that any sort of academic or educational discussion of circumvention tools would be protected. Basically 2600 didn't even pretend to have a veneer of academic discussion, so it was a completely different case; if _Wired_ were taken to court and lost, that would be much more similar to our situation. In fact in the years since the 2600 case, many dozens of people have published such keys and circumvention devices in academic and educational contexts, and none has lost a court case.
None has lost one - has any been put through one?
Not on DMCA grounds, to my knowledge. The RIAA, MPAA, DVD-CCA, and similar groups have been extremely afraid of bringing any more for fear of the 2600 case's chilling effects being weakened. The 2600 case was a best-case scenario for them: The party they were suing made no even half-assed attempt to be educational, explicitly and openly posted the tool *as* a circumvention device, and probably worst of all subtitled themselves "The Hacker Quarterly". Basically the only way to go with a follow-up case is down. The RIAA and SDMI did famously threaten [[Edward Felten]] with a lawsuit for publishing details on how to break SDMI, but rapidly backtracked so far that they ended up actually arguing in court that Felten *wasn't* violating the DMCA, to avoid the possibility of the DMCA being litigated.
A few cases on trade-secret grounds have been brought, with the defendents prevailing on the defense that something posted a million times on the internet cannot be a trade secret. Andrew Brunner is the most notable one of those.
-Mark