Is this case the best that the Feds could do? It sounds like a real farce, where the witnesses were at least as culpable as the accused, and maybe even committed more crimes than the accused did.
So, really, is this the best case to try hardware mods as being illegal under the DMCA?
Jurors, who heard only one day of testimony, left the courthouse with mixed opinions on the case. “When we left yesterday, I was thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’” said juror Paul Dietz, a 27-year-old actor. He said he “probably would have” acquitted.
Another juror, Jerry Griffin, a 63-year-old trial attorney, said “I think Microsoft has a right to protect its proprietary information.”
I've noticed a huge difference between patents and copyright.
Patents keep technology the same.
Copyright protects (at least in intention) an author's work and future works, but not its ideas. IIRC the first usage of a school for wizards was in A Wizard of Earthsea. If Ursula K. Le Guin had a patent on the idea, Harry Potter would never have been able to appear (at least without a huge legal trial and consider that without hindsight this book was considered lucky to get a 1000 book print run) even though the usage and responses are enormously different.
Copyright is essentially a security fence, it stops people breaking in and stealing all your money. While a patent is like constructing a concrete dome over your house and making it criminal for anyone to even look at your house and borrow the architecture.
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention.
Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted by the law of a jurisdiction to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Exceptions and limitations to these rights strive to balance the public interest in the wide distribution of the material produced and to encourage creativity. Exceptions include fair dealing and fair use, and such use does not require the permission of the copyright owner. All other uses require permission and copyright owners can license or permanently transfer or assign their exclusive rights to others.
Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression or fixation. In most jurisdictions, copyright arises upon fixation and does not need to be registered. Copyright protection applies for a specific period of time, after which the work is said to enter the public domain.
The ars technica article which was posted yesterday has more on this:
"The fair-use issue came up as the judge berated prosecutor Allen Chiu’s proposed jury instructions, which included the assertion that the government need not prove that Crippen “willfully” breached the law, in what is known as “mens rea” in legal parlance. The judge noted that the government’s own intellectual property crimes manual concerning the 1998 DMCA says the defendant has to have some knowledge that he was breaking the law.
“The first prosecution 12 years later, and you’re suggesting a mens rea that is akin to exactly contrary to the IP manual: that ignorance of the law is no excuse?” the judge barked."
So, really, is this the best case to try hardware mods as being illegal under the DMCA?