Allonn Levy of the HS Law Group <http://www.hsapc.com>, represents Matt
Pavlovich in the DVD CCA v. Bunner, et al. suit.
For background on this case, see the documents at
<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/>.
I spoke with Allonn Levy on the phone a couple of weeks ago, and he asked me to
ask the Debian Developers to draft an Amicus Brief ("friend of the
court") document for submission to the California Supreme Court, who are
currently deciding whether to hear Matt's appeal on jurisdictional
grounds. See
<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/20010808_eff_pavlovich_pr.html>.
I am mailing debian-legal, which I think has the highest concentration
of people interested in drafting such a document. If you know of any
Debian Developers who don't subscribe to this list who may be interested
in participating, please ask them to join this list.
I talked to Ben Collins about this issue earlier today, and he agreed to
sign off on whatever we can collectively come up with.
Essentially, the ruling issued by the appeals court:
* has some factual inaccuracies;
* prejudges several issues to be decided at trial;
* is grounded on the notion the reverse engineering is an
illegitimate practice;
* seems scornful of the notion that there is such a thing as
movie or computer industries outside the State of California;
* doesn't seem to even know what the Free Software community is;
* doesn't take into account the negative impact that Hollywood
and the laws it has purchased will have on OUR segement of the
"computer industry"
I think we should try to come up with a document that covers the above
while trying to stick as close to objective facts as possible. We
should also describe who we are and what we do, and mention that
commercial companies have based retail products on our work product.
The California Supreme Court justices probably understand boxed product
even if they're as ignorant of Free Software as the Appeals Court judges
apparently are. Also, many of our members come from academia, where
Free Software has been a tradition for generations. A lot of people are
simply ignorant of the history of computer software before Microsoft
Windows.
Please review
<http://www.eff.org/Cases/DVDCCA_case/20010807_pavlovich_appelate_ruling.html>
and identify any factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies in this
document.
At root, we want to answer one question:
Why shouldn't the State of California be able to assert its jurisdiction
over anyone in the world in civil matters? (You can't extradite someone
on a non-criminal complaint, AFAIK.)
I'll try and have a draft of my own remarks posted to this list sometime
tomorrow.
--
G. Branden Robinson | Suffer before God and ye shall be
Debian GNU/Linux | redeemed. God loves us, so He
branden@deadbeast.net | makes us suffer Christianity.
http://www.deadbeast.net/~branden/ | -- Aaron Dunsmore
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