ArsTechnica has an article on how the DMCA was recently thrown out by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, in the case between Lexmark and Static Control Components.
I haven't heard of the case before, but the judgement interests me, as we've been studying the DMCA and DAA in my IT/Law (LEGT2771) subject at Uni. Basically, the gist of it is that Lexmark, in an attempt to lock out third-party toner cartridge makers, implemented a chip that requires the toner cartridge to verify it is "valid". Static Control Components (SCC) reverse-engineered the chip and created one of their own, so that their cartridges would work with the Lexmark printers. Lexmark filed suit for copyright infringement under the DMCA. In October 2003, the courts ruled against Lexmark, and they appealed.
The appeals court ruled that the "authentication code" used to validate toner cartridges was not covered under copyright, and so Lexmark had no grounds to claim copyright circumvention through the DMCA.
The crucial point is that the DMCA forbids anyone from trafficking in any technology that "is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [protected] work." 17 U.S.C. ยง 1201(2)(A) (emphasis added).The key question is the "purpose" of the circumvention technology. The microchip in SCC's toner cartridges is intended not to reap any benefit from the Toner Loading Program - SCC's microchip is not designed to measure toner levels - but only for the purpose of making SCC's competing toner cartridges work with printers manufactured by Lexmark.
The appeals court also said:
We should make clear that in the future companies like Lexmark cannot use the DMCA in conjunction with copyright law to create monopolies of manufactured goods for themselves just by tweaking the facts of this case: by, for example, creating a Toner Loading Program that is more complex and "creative" than the one here, or by cutting off other access to the Printer Engine Program.
As the author of the ArsTechnica article mentions, this may have some ramifications for Apple, as it may allow Real to circumvent the FairPlay DRM system. On a side note, I hope this brings the problems of the DMCA (and DAA) into focus, as (in my opinion) it changes the basis of copyright dramatically, giving the copyright holders considerably more rights and reducing that of the users.
Since you’ve been studying the DMCA in class I’ve got a question for you. There seems to be a lot of opinions out there but I can’t seem to find a good overview for the legality of it.
If someone is building a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) based on Freevo or MythTV is the ‘copying’ of the DVD to their hard drive of DVDs they legally own illegal by the DMCA? I’ve seem some information that relates to fair use however the reading I’ve done seems to imply there is no free use under the DMCA….would this be a correct assumption?
Thanks.
I can’t give you a concrete answer, but from what I’ve read, I would think copying a DVD to a hard disk is not covered under fair use. Copying the DVD directly might be (as a “backup”), but since you’re converting the content of the DVD (covered under copyright) into another form (e.g. an MPEG4 file, DivX, etc), that’s probably adaptation.