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).