[ Thanks for this link to Bryan Taylor, who notes that
the transcript of day 3 is at
http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/20000719_ny_trial_transcript.html.
]
“Wednesday morning in the New York DVD trial began with
continued examination of Marsha King, a VP in Time-Warner. She
explained how terribly hurt the studios were by the mere loss of
confidence in CSS, let alone the millions of dollars they could
also potentially lose from illicit copying. She described her
participation in creating the DVD format, deciding on security
standards for it, and negotiating with the consumer electronics and
computer industries on a common position (which was enshrined in
the CSS and the CSS license agreements).”
“Interestingly, Judge Kaplan refused to allow questioning in
any area related to when and whether buyers of Warner DVDs receive
the “authority of the copyright holder”, which is a critical
element of whether the buyer is circumventing when they play a
DVD. The judge thought it was obvious, and eventually
facetiously asked Ms. King whether Time-Warner authorized buyers to
play their DVDs on players which have never signed a DVDCCA
license, to which she said “No”. But this begged the question of
exactly how a consumer knows what authority they have been granted,
where that authority is defined by a company, whether the company
can change its mind later or for specific consumers, whether this
authority is general or can have limitations such as “you are
authorized to play this Sony movie only on Sony’s DVD players”,
etc. It is our position that the authority to play a DVD is granted
to the buyer at the time of purchase, without limitation. Any other
reading of the statute produces chaos in the market, since after
selling a single copy of a technically-protected work, any
copyright owner would have the legal right to decide what players
are permitted to exist in the entire market (by withdrawing their
authority for some drives to play their work, and then suing drive
distributors, as Time Warner sued 2600, to ban them as unauthorized
circumventers).”