Spent yesterday at the Royal Courts of Justice. The defendant in the Sony v Channel lost the case, though the judge was excellent. See the obligatory Register article, with nice quote from me at the bottom. Obligatory article from the Register. Nice quote from Yours Truly at the bottom.
Mr Justice Jacobs was highly critical of Sony's case (though he agreed that the statute law was entirely with them). He noted that they could monopolise the Playstation games market through their copy-control mechanism, and he didn't like this at all. His ruling probably confirms the prohibition on DeCSS, criminalises the commercial sale of devices based on DeCSS, and certainly confirms that privately importing digital goods is a no-no.
On returning to Cambridge, I went to the Computing Society's talk, which was given by David Braben, author of Elite and now a PS2 games developer. We had a great old discussion of the piracy issue in the pub afterwards. As luck would have it I was to be giving a talk to the Computing Society this term about these sorts of issues; I'll have a lot more material now.
Didn't quite make it back home last night, which is good, cause the walk to the office is a killer (not that I slept at the office).