Appeals

Posted Oct 7, 2004 2:32 UTC (Thu) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]

Should we conclude that a country's schools, roads, hospitals or judiciary system has "limited commercial purpose or use" if they are provided to a person free of charge (e.g. even if the person pays no taxes, or in some cases even if the person isn't a citizen of the country) ?

Could we not conclude that they have even greater use & value by being provided free of charge, by making them more accessible?

One way of forcing a rethink about what constitutes a circumvention device would be to [suggest hypothetically] suing the judge for providing his ruling to the public. His ruling has "limited commercial purpose or use", so is strictly speaking a circumvention device under the current wording of the law (see "relevance of commercial use" post).

A slightly less frivolous approach is to take something that can in fact be used for circumventing a control device (more precisely "a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this [DMCA/copyright] title"). Possibly the judge's ruling can still be used as such a circumvention device, e.g. via buffer overflow causing a separate checking process to crash, where the invoker treats crashing the same as it would treat an indication of successful authentication. Or using the printed copy of the ruling as a masking device similar to how marker pens were famously able to circumvent a certain CD protection scheme.

Ideally the protected work in question should be a brief poem that makes a point similar to the first two paragraphs of this post, perhaps rhyming "free of charge" with "access to the community at large".

The suggestions in this post probably shouldn't be taken too seriously, but they could form a part of a verbal argument presented to a judge as to why the law should be changed/reinterpreted.