Check out today's EU final copyright directive which perfectly mirrors the DMCA: http://www.europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/dat/2001/l_167/l_16720010622en00100019.p df (153KB) We offer an HTML version: http://cryptome.org/eu-copyright.htm (57KB) Here's an excerpt on circumvention devices: Article 6 Obligations as to technological measures 1. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective. 2. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which: (a) are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or (b) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or (c) are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of, any effective technological measures. 3. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression 'technological measures' means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject-matter, which are not authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed 'effective' where the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the rightholders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective. [End excerpt]

On 22 Jun 2001, at 12:03, Steve Schear wrote:

I don't understand how DMCA comes into play for content already ripped by someone else.

You're correct, of course. It doesn't.

...

Does @Home also filter & grab NNTP requests to servers they don't control, like some other ISP is filtering & grabbing SMTP?

I don't think so, but have never checked.

It seems that one ploy the digital video posters could use is to select a popular, innocuous, news group, and add their content. @Home would then be forced to either filter binaries from that group or take it offline, offending a lot of innocent users.

steve

They're not forced to do anything. They're probably under the delusion that they're safer from liability if they ban groups whose names imply pirated content. It's not their fault if somebody puts metallica mp3s in alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork, but what the hell did anyone expect to be in alt.binaries.metallica? I think actually they're shooting themselves in the foot. If they excercise no editorial control at all over their news servers they're protecyed as common carriers, whereas if they do excercise some control, they might be considered to approve of whatever they let through. OTOH, they're probably rich enough to be safe anyway. George