Jason Schultz comments on a recent decision of the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals: 'Hurray! Justice delayed ends up being justice rendered. Over a year ago, StorageTek managed to convince a district court in Boston to misuse standard copyright law and the DMCA anticompetitively and shut down an independent service vendor who offered repair and maintenance on StorageTek machines.' This decision has nowbeen overturned:

...it is unlikely StorageTek will succeed on the merits of its copyright claim. To the extent that CHE's activities do not constitute copyright infringement or facilitate copyright infringement, StorageTek is foreclosed from maintaining an action under the DMCA ... [T]he DMCA must be read in the context of the Copyright Act, which balances the rights of the copyright owner against the public’s interest in having appropriate access to the work. Therefore, courts generally have found a violation of the DMCA only when the alleged access was intertwined with a right protected by the Copyright Act... To the extent that StorageTek’s rights under copyright law are not at risk, the DMCA does not create a new source of liability.

Even if StorageTek were able to prove that the automatic copying of the software into RAM constituted copyright infringement, however, it would still have to show that the LEM or ELEM facilitated that infringement. ... If such a nexus were not required, the careful balance that Congress sought to achieve between the 'interests of content creators and information users' would be upset.

[citations omitted]

Originally by Jason Schultz at LawGeek, 9:10 PM

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