b.cognosco

As reported Sunday, Blackboard, Inc. was seeking to stop a presentation by two students at the Atlanta hackers conference where the two claimed they would show how to link any device to a Blackboard network.

According to the article, an initial Cease and Desist letter made reference to DMCA violations, but the actual complaint made no such reference. This points out two things:

• We don't now, and never did, need the DMCA to prevent the outright theft of legitimate trade secrets and copyrighted works
• State laws are, in many cases, much more restrictive than federal laws.

The reason the recording and film industries wanted the DMCA was to bypass the government bureaucracy that often gets in their way when pursuing such cases, and to avoid having to deal with 50 different sets of IP laws at the state level. In short, to make their lives easier at our expense.

But as we have now seen, the MPAA and the RIAA have already begun lobbying state governments to promote Super-DMCA bills that strip even more rights from users. Thankfully, the technology and user communities are awake this time around, and we can expect the recording industry to have increasing difficulty passing laws of convenience.

Court blocks security conference talk

By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 15, 2003, 1:13 AM PT

A pair of students were blocked by a state court from presenting information at a Georgia security and hackers' conference on how to break into and modify a university electronic transactions system.

Washington D.C.-based education software company Blackboard successfully convinced a Georgia state court to block the students' presentation, which was scheduled to be given at the Interz0ne conference in Atlanta last weekend. [...]

Although an initial cease and desist letter sent to the Interz0ne conference organizers hinted that the students may have violated the DMCA, the complaint that resulted in the temporary restraining order did not touch on that copyright law.

Instead, the restraining order was grounded largely in federal and Georgia state antihacking laws and a state trade secrets act. [...] [C/Net News]