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Links: Sixth Circuit Blocks DMCA Use for Printer Cartridges
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Thursday, October 28 @ 11:39:24 EDT Digital Millennium Copyright Act
A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit has reversed a preliminary injunction in favor of printer manufacturer Lexmark in its lawsuit against third-party cartridge maker Static Controls. The opinion joins the Federal Circuit's ruling last month in a case involving garage door openers in refusing to read the DMCA's anti-circumvention ban to cover situations in which the copyrighted content is there only to bootstrap its way into the DMCA's protections, rather than being independently valuable.

The Sixth Circuit's opinion also includes an interesting use of the 'merger' doctrine to conclude that because Lexmark printers check that a particular program text appears in memory in the cartridge, that program text has become entirely functional and is therefore not copyrightable in the first place. (Although this piece of the opinion only got two out of three judges to sign on, it remains the opinion of the court and thus binding precedent in the Sixth Circuit.)

 
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Re: Sixth Circuit Blocks DMCA Use for Printer Cartridges (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, November 02 @ 14:26:49 EST
OT

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[ Reply to This ]


Re: Sixth Circuit Blocks DMCA Use for Printer Cartridges (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, November 04 @ 11:46:01 EST
What will this do for Haebus(?), the company that uses copyrighted haiku in email headers as a sender authentication method, claiming to use copyright to stop unauthorised senders from including the poem?

If the poem could be considered entirely functional as set out in this judgement does that not remove the protection they require?


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