Student Sued For Using SHIFT Key
 

SunnComm, a software company whose CD protection scheme was broken by a student who pressed the shift key, will sue the student for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12034

the power of shift!

It will make for an interesting lawsuit.. because i think technically, he did violate the DMCA by figuring out how to "hack" or "reverse-enginneer" the process to get around the copy protection.

On the otherhand he was just releasing information about it.

But then again, the DeCSS script, plain ascii text, was banned from any US website by a court order because the text violates DMCA and those that displayed the code were contributing to the infringement.

The courts said, if i remember correctly, that 1st amendment rights of free speech were second to the infringement acts.

So you can speak out about the copy protection, kinda like me speaking out about patent abuse cases, but just don't post exact info about how to crack/hack the protection. (unless of course you live in a country that won't prosecute you for the information)

Fight the Patent!

Russia is loving that right now

I wonder if the person that "broke" the CD protection scheme of not allowing a "protected" CD to play in a PC-cdrom drive by using a black marker to "break" the protection, was ever sued for his post...

notice how i didn't say how he used the black marker to break the copy protection? wouldn't want to get into trouble for posting "contraband" information.

:Graucho



Fight the Patent!

Those idiots need to sue thier developers for making a shity protection :ak47: :321GFY

Hopefully this will mark the beginning of the end for the DMCA

Um, if it could be disabled by using shift, it should never have had a market value of over $10,000,000 anyway. :eek7

the Internet is a playground for lawyers nowadays. If a know a bit about the Internet law, it can make $$ lots of $$

It has potentials to make.... yes. So far all of these clowns haven't achived much things and keep spending money on stupid lawsuits due to lack of creativity to do anything else. They are the real internet mafia.

SunnComm is full of shift. I hope the fights the suit because that's bullshift.
:1orglaugh

Wouldnt their money be better spent either suing the stupid programmer that enabled the hack? or actually trying to develop something worthwhile?

they probably think its cheaper to intimidate all of us into not doing anything than protecting their own content. If you had a great protection script that could be disabled using the shift key, what would you do?

What if parents started suing the "child protection filters" they installed on the computers to keep their kids away from porn? "I had this on the computer, you said it was supposed to keep my kid away from porn, and it didnt"

if a judge rules in SunnComm;s favor, i will offically lose ALL faith in mankind.

If the judge rules that Acacia's patent claims are upheld and the defendants are indeed infringing on their patents, is when i leave the computing and internet biz behind and go back to woodworking.... less chance of creating furniture design that will be zinged later on with patents...especially business method patents which are a whole different troublesome issue.


Fight the Patent!

i use shift every time I put a music cd anywhere near my PC.

half of them autolaunch stupid programs, hidden videos, AOL installers, and other bullshit i didn't want.

Looks like Suncomm won't be suing the person who reported about the SHIFT Key thing:

http://www.avnonline.com/issues/2003...101003_6.shtml




Fight the Patent!

I already have.

LOL, glad I read all the way down, I was going to make the same crack (the first part) :1orglaugh