FC: Text of appeals court's decision in MPAA vs. 2600 DMCA suit

The version of the opinion up on EFF and 2600 is barely readable. This one
is larger but scanned from hardcopy:
http://vorlon.mit.edu/~declan/dmca/appeals.decision.112801.pdf

Says Chuck Sims, an attorney representing the MPAA member companies, as
quoted in my article:
"The arguments against this law are preposterous. It's an EFF fund-raising
operation. It's raised lots of money by hysterical attacks against this
law. Four judges have looked at the challenges and said, 'There's no there
there.'"

-Declan

---
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48726,00.html
    Copyright Law Foes Lose Big
    By Declan McCullagh (declan_at_wired.com)
    9:00 a.m. Nov. 29, 2001 PST
    WASHINGTON -- If there was a scorecard for copyright lawsuits, this
    week it would look like this: entertainment industry 2, free speech
    zip.
    On Wednesday, with a pair of federal courts siding with the music and
    record industry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lost two of its
    most important intellectual property cases so far.
    Programmers, hackers and open-source aficionados had pinned their
    hopes on these lawsuits as a way to eviscerate the Digital Millennium
    Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law loved by the entertainment and
    software industries almost as much as it's hated by computer
    professionals.
    Now, all of a sudden, repealing the reviled DMCA through First
    Amendment litigation seems altogether unlikely. Nor, given how much
    Washington politicians adore the law, is Congress likely to alter it.
    In its decision (PDF) on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of
    Appeals trashed the EFF's arguments, saying they were anything but
    convincing. The appeals panel ruled 3-0 to uphold an August 2000
    decision by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan that barred 2600 magazine
    from distributing a DVD-descrambling utility.
    [...]
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