Play Station and copyright

[Birgit Kellner]

Aaron Gerow wrote:

> I just want to ask those more knowledgable on the subject, do region
> codes have any backing in copyright law, in Japan or elsewhere?  Or is
> the reason citing copyright violation just a screen to convince people to
> turn in their old programming soft, and to avoid putting the spotlight on
> the agreement between manufacturers?
>

I am certainly not more knowledgable, but from what I've heard (or read),
your second question could be answered in the affirmative, at least if you
follow the line of argument of the defendents in the lawsuit about the
decoder source code (DeCSS) of the DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS), a
number of people who have published information about CSS on the Internet,
who have linked to such information, and so on. The case was filed by the
"Digital Versatile Disc Copy Control Association" (DVD-CCA), and the charges
were violating trade secrets and other intellectual property rights. For more
information, see the homepage of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign
(http://www.gilc.org), and for Japan in particular, it might be worthwile
checking out the homepage of NaST (Networkers against Surveillance Taskforce,
JAPAN), http://www.jca.apc.org/privacy.

best,

Birgit Kellner