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[LawGeek] Over a year ago, StorageTek managed to convince a district court in Boston to misuse standard copyright law and the DMCA anticompetitively and shut down an independent service vendor who offered repair and maintenance on StorageTek machines. (By doing so, StorageTek was able to leverage the vast majority of service contracts on its library units for itself).
Some related posts from Technorati and Google.
[Copyfight] Courts on DMCA: You Can Repair Products, But You Can't Improve Them (Donna Wentworth): A few weeks ago over at the Picker MobBlog, Julie Cohen observed that while the DMCA may be a failure at controlling the "darknet," industry players find it useful for other purposes -- like "marginaliz[ing] the open source movement (at least in the consumer market) by erecting insuperable obstacles to the development of interoperable entertainment platforms."
[ Silicon Valley Media Law Blog] Storagetek ruling on DMCA, software copyrights: Custom Hardware Engineering & Consulting,Download file last week. The case is noteworthy for a number of reasons -- it takes a limited view of the scope of the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, and it takes a broad view of the rights of third party agents to access software for maintenance purposes under copyright law, as well under software license terms.
[ robhyndman.com] A Reversal of DMCA Fortunes: The [U.S.] Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court decision that blocked an independent service vendor who offered repair and maintenance on StorageTek machines. The court ruled that the DMCA cannot be used to sue such vendors when the repair and maintanence itself does not violate any rights under copyright law.
[Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things] Court: DMCA can't prohibit third-party repairs: Today, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed [PDF] the trial court's order, holding that third parties can lawfully repair and maintain another company's software under Section 117 of the Copyright Act and, more importantly, that the DMCA cannot be used to sue such vendors when the repair and maintanence itself doesn't violate any rights under copyright law. The decision follows up on the Court's previous vindication of Skylink in its DMCA case against Chamberlain over garage door openers.
[Corante.com] CORANTE Tech News. Filtered Daily.: About this weblogHere we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill policy-making, technical standards development and technological innovation that creates -- and will recreate -- the networked world as we know it. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of copyright, private vs.
[Lawgeek.typepad.com] LawGeek: DMCA hammer comes down on tech service vendor: The new contractor (who apparently had done such conversions for other customers previously) was threatened that if he looked at the old software, he'd be sued. We had to end up paying the old contractor to export the data into a generic format, so the new contractor would clearly not be violating any proprietary rights when he picked up the exported data and imported it into the new SW.
[Weblog.infoworld.com] The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster: According to the court's summary of the case, the third- party support vendor violated the DMCA by circumventing StorageTek's GetKey, a software key that prevents access to StorageTek's "maintenance code." The maintenance code is essentially all the built-in diagnostic firmware in StorageTek's silo systems, including most importantly the ability to generate event messages from the devices to allow a technician to diagnose problems. A key point for the court is that the maintenance code is retained for the exclusive use of technicians authorized by StorageTek and is not licensed to the customer.
Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Dmca, DVD Player News
Posted at October 08, 2005 08:44 AM
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