Legal issues

Hi,

first let me say hello, I just got a NetMD MZ-N707.  It's fresh out of the
box, but I got hooked up on the mailing list archive, and have repeatedly
seen concerns about the legality of developing software to download files to
the player.  I am not a lawyer, but I have some experience with legal issues
when they concern free software, and I wonder if the problems really apply
here.

There are a couple of laws to consider: Mainly copyright law, patent law, and
the DMCA.

Copyright law restricts the copying of works.  Such a work might be a
software program or a music file.  However, you are writing the software
yourself.  As long as you don't copy from other people's programs, you are
perfectly fine.  There is a grey zone when it comes to any static tables you
might need.  Short command sequences are certainly not copyrightable.  You
can make a good case about anything that is just a number, even if the
number has a special effect (ie, if it is a key, like in the DeCSS case).  A
number is not really a creative work, and thus probably does not deserve the
protection of copyright law.  There is also the data you download to the
player: However, that is copied with the original software from Sony, too,
so there is no case to be made from that.

Patent law might be more of concern, at least in countries with software
patents (ie, everywhere, even in the EU practically).  If the involved
algorithms are patented, your software might not be able to use them.  This
is what happened with MP3.  So patent law alone might make it infeasible to
write an ATRAC encoder, even if the full details of the specification are
well known.  If the involved encryption algorithm is patented (as some
elliptic curves are in some places, IIRC), then you might have a problem,
too.

Then there is the DMCA.  An evil law.  However, the DMCA only makes devices
illegal that circumvent a copy prevention mechanism.  However, let's assume
you find a way to encrypt an ATRAC file so that you can download it to the
player.  Then you have not circumvented any copy protection mechanism. 
There is nothing you made a copy of that you didn't have before.  This is
quite different from the DeCSS, where you had a copy of the encrypted data
and decrypted it.  For the NetMD device, we need to find a way to encrypt
the data.  You start out with some nice copyable and unobfuscated data, and
then you mangle it all into a stream of bytes undistinguishable from random
bytes.  I wonder how Sony could make a case of that.

I have not catched up with all the mail here on the list, but I plan to.  I
also hope I can contribute something to the code (but give me a couple of
days, I first need to get everything set up).  So please apologize if this
issue was already covered in that detail, or if my assumptions about the
technical details are wrong.

Another legal issue is the copyright of your code.  It might make sense to
assign the copyright for the code to a trusted third party, like the Free
Software Foundation Europe.  Currently, there are not even copyright notices
in the code, so even though I downloaded it, I can not be sure that I even
have the right to look at it.

Thanks,
Marcus


-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    [email protected]
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
[email protected]
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/