Comment by amiga386
3 months ago
Which part of the text "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" on a website constitutes distribution of "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" ?
Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.
However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.
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