I think the court's decision in the DeCSS case sucked, but I also think some of the folks on this list are misunderstanding *why* it sucked. Greg London: > >I'm probably preaching to the choir here, > >but the fact that a judge has ruled that > >a human readable language, specifically > >C and Perl, is legally different than > >other languages, such as English or French, > >truly, truly ticks me off. Elaine -HFB- Ashton: > n.b. I suspect the reason the judge didn't rule against the version > in English is that it would impinge upon the Freedom of Speech. The court's decision made a big deal about the distiction between "expressive" and "functional" speech. Functional communication, the judge said, has less First Amendment protection than purely expressive communication, and since the primary purpose of the DeCSS code was functional (telling a computer how to decrypt a DVD), distributing DeCSS was not protected by the First Amendment. The RIAA, in its original complaint, only asked for a prohibition on distributing the original DeCSS software written in C, and didn't say anything about the various other forms in which CSS-decrypting software has been written. Therefore, the judge said he wasn't even considering the legality of those other forms. Note that the legal distinction is expressive vs. functional, not human-readable vs. non-human-readable. If I say "kill" to my dog, and the dog follows my command, I cannot argue that my statement was protected by the First Amendment. If memory serves, one of the arguments in the DeCSS *appeal* is that computer code has to be considered as expressive rather than functional communication -- because if it were purely functional, you wouldn't be able to copyright a computer program that you wrote. -- "The big dig might come in handy ... for a few project managers whom I think would make great landfill." --Elaine Ashton == seth gordon == [EMAIL PROTECTED] == standard disclaimer == == documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==
