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Links: Bunner Walks
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Sunday, February 29 @ 19:32:49 EST Free Expression
Andrew Bunner's long national nightmare is over. A California appeals court has dismissed the DVD Mafia's request for a preliminary injunction against him to stop him from posting the DeCSS code on the Internet.

Another strand of the case made it as far as the U.S. Supreme Court in a fight over personal jurisdiction, that bane of first-year law students. Bunner's own legal fight went up to the Californa Supreme Court, which refused to modify California trade secret law to take account of First Amendment concern. On remand, however, the second-level appellate court found that DeCSS didn't sufficiently qualify as a trade secret by the time Bunner slapped it on the Intar-Web to justify an injunction.

There's a mild irony in this sequence of events: the big fight over trade secret law turned out to be a sideshow, given how much of a non-case there was underneath. Civil disobedience in the form of massively distributed mirroring does work. Well, at least if they sue you under trade secret law, as opposed to the DMCA, as the defendants in Remierdes found out.

 
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Not a trade secret to begin with (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, March 01 @ 13:48:09 EST
The whole idea of it being a trade secret hinged on the guy in Norway having broken the law there to obtain the information. But he didn't, as found by a Norwegian court and again in an appeal. The fact the courts in the US never revistited that piece of information doesn't mean it wasn't relevant.


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