Static Control Wins DMCA Reversal!

This just in --- Static Control Corp. has won its appeal against Lexmark over the right to produce after-market replacement cartridges for Lexmark printers.

Read the opinion here

More on the case here.

Comments

[Joe Buck]

Interesting. As I read the legal reasoning, it seems to say that if you use a cryptographic hash (MD5 or SHA-1 or the like) of your whole program as a lockout key, that makes every byte of your program functional rather than expressive, and grants others the right to copy the whole thing for compatibility purposes, no matter how big it is. I'm concerned that the higher courts might not want to go that far.

[Karl]

AOL already does something similar with its OSCAR protocol. The servers send a request for the hash of a range of bytes in the AIM exe. The only way for you to get past that is to have the full executable itself. More information can be found at http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:w6bpd_PzNiMJ:iserverd1.khstu.ru/oscar/sequences.html&hl=en#verification (using the Google cache because the actual site is extremely slow).

Sega also used IP to protect its systems from unlicensed games. In version 2+ of the Genesis, licensed games had to have the string "SEGA" at a certain location in ROM. That string would trigger the message, "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises." So, you had to use Sega's trademark (AND claim that your product was licensed by Sega!) for your game to run. This was shot down by the courts. (Sega v Accolade, http://www.law.seattleu.edu/fachome/chonm/Cases/sega.html) Later Sega systems actually require a whole program (copied verbatim) to be on the disc, which displays a similar message.