Court Upholds DeCSS Ruling
from the weird-interpretation-of-the-law dept
Ugh. A day for odd judgments. The Court of Appeals has upheld a decision saying it's illegal to link to the DeCSS code that allows Linux users to view DVDs. If you don't know anything about this case, I'm not going to catch you up now. There are lots of things to take issue with (and some are outlined in the article), but the one that bugs me the most is the fact that they say it's illegal to only link to illegal code. Not to post it yourself - but to link to another site that has it. This is ridiculous. There are a fairly large number of sites that link to Techdirt (thanks!), and if I posted a copy of the DeCSS code to Techdirt, they'd automatically be breaking the law, if I understand this correctly (and maybe I don't). Of course, so would I, but the fact that I can make other people "break the law", simply by posting some text to my website doesn't seem right to me.
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