Calif law applies everywhere; DeCSS
Alfred Qaeda
alqaeda at hq.org
Wed Aug 8 10:43:16 PDT 2001
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20010807/tc/out-of-state_resident_can_be_sued_in_dvd_case_1.html
Out-of-state resident can be sued in DVD
case
By Jim Hu CNET News.com
An out-of-state resident who allegedly posted computer code that
circumvents DVD encryption measures can be sued under California
law,
a California appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The Sixth Appellate Court of California
decided that
Matthew Pavlovich, who is not a California
resident,
could be tried for violating the state's trade
secrets
law.
"The reach of the Internet is also the reach
of the
extension of the poster's presence," the
ruling stated.
The decision follows what appeared to have
been a
small victory for Pavlovich in December 2000,
when
the California Supreme Court ordered a lower
court
to show he should remain in the case even though he is not a
California
resident.
Because of the ruling, others involved in the case living
outside California
will remain under the state's jurisdiction. The ruling could
show that the
Internet is not immune to California's long-arm statutes even
when the
publisher of the site is located outside the state.
The DVD Copy Control Association originally filed a complaint in
December 1999 against Pavlovich for allegedly posting the DeCSS
(news
- web sites) code on his Web site. The suit was meant to prevent
the
dissemination of DeCSS, a code whose original intent was to let
programmers create a DVD player for Linux (news - web sites)
machines.
The movie industry and DVD CCA argued that DeCSS could be used
to
illegally copy DVDs and have taken legal action against people
posting the
code on their sites. In a federal case filed in New York, for
example, the
Motion Picture Association of America is suing 2600, a site that
published and linked to the DeCSS code.
Allon Levy, the attorney representing Pavlovich, could not be
reached for
comment.
"The very significance in it has held that persons like
Pavlovich in various
parts of the country are subject to jurisdiction in a California
court if they
did what Pavlovich did," said Robert Sugarman, an attorney at
Weil,
Gotshal & Manges and a legal counsel for the DVD CCA.
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