Preview note on court report on Edelman v. N2H2 dismissal hearing
Today, I attended the court hearing on N2H2's motion to dismiss the Edelman v. N2H2 case. That is, N2H2 was claiming that, roughly there is no "there" there - no reason for a court to rule. Because no actual censorware decryption work had been done in the case, and hence nobody had been sued. Of course, in a way, that situation is the rationale for the case in the first place. It's a "declaratory judgment" case, concerning whether some action is permissible, before it's in fact done. These sorts of cases seem to be caught in a tension between being Catch-22's and being speculations.
The judge started off the hearing by stating that he found the case "extremely dubious", and asked the ACLU to convince him otherwise. And it didn't get much better from there. Full report to follow.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in censorware , dmca , legal | on March 31, 2003 11:43 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups
