sad day for decoding freedom

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome@real-time.com>]

this is from the Pan newsreader's home page (www.superpimp.org).
for some background; the original lawsuit was over Pan's inclusion of code
to decode binaries (just like almost every other newsreader..).
for clarity, I included some historical news items.

*******************

October 11, 2000 - RIAA Wins Pan Lawsuit

The slow-moving lawsuit between the RIAA and SuperPimpSoft has come to an
unforunate end. Mere hours after today's release of Pan 0.9, United States
District Judge Mark Taylor ruled against the free-software startup. In a
strongly-worded 89-page ruling the Judge declared that SuperPimpSoft had
wrongly encouraged copyright violation of pictures, music, and even movies
by providing the ability to decode and save files posted to Usenet. Court is
in recess until Friday, when it will convene to discuss injunctive and
declaratory relief.

Hillary Rosen, president of the RIAA, was ebullient: ``As with [the lawsuit
against] mp3.com, the courts have sided with the music makers -- the
dreamers of dreams -- instead of high-tech vultures."

The ruling must come an embarassing blow to Napster, which purchased the
free-software startup one week ago. Neither Napster nor SuperPimpSoft had
any comment at press time.
One Pan programmer, who refused to be named, hinted that today's release of
0.9 was no accident: "[Judge] Taylor's been hostile to us since day one. We
wanted to release one final version with the [mp3] decoder.''

July 12, 2000 - Napster Buyout Talks

Nothing has been signed yet, but as we're drowning in e-mail asking us about
it, I've gotten permission to put up this mini-FAQ:

Yes, Napster has approached us in buyout talks.
Yes, Napster sees the RIAA/Pan suit as a legal asset. We can't say any more
about this.
Yes, Napster's legal team--including David Boies--would work with us on our
RIAA suit.
Yes, Pan will keep its GPL license.
The talks will happen in their own sweet time, so please stop asking us
about this.

June 26, 2000 - RIAA Lawsuit Update

The RIAA has returned to its original demand that we remove the binary
decoder from Pan. They believe that since the decoder is a third-party
library, our claim that it's unremovable is false. So with our July 24 court
date a little less than a month away, we're back to square one. The
strangest moment of the week came when one RIAA lawyer, in a moment of
frustration, asked us how we'd feel if someone took Pan and gave it away to
millions of users for free. After the Pan team stopped laughing, the Andover
lawyers had to explain why we liked the idea so much. There's a Salon
article here somewhere. :)

June 17, 2000 - Pan, RIAA Updates  Don't worry, we're not dead! We've been
hacking away on the new version of Pan, which will be released next week.
Also, the FAQ has been updated.

There is still no court date yet for RIAA vs. SuperPimpSoft. Andover's
lawyers -- thanks again to Andover for giving us pro bono legal aid -- have
renewed negotiations with the RIAA, so there may be a happy ending to this
after all.
In other news, it looks like we've hit the Big Time: we're now a blip on the
radar of Metallica's Lars Ulrich, who recently said ``...those [people] at
Napster, Gnutella, and SuperPimpSoft ought to be in jail.'' Who said Usenet
was dead? :)

May 17, 2000 - RIAA Demands Decoder be Removed from Pan   As reported on
this page, SuperPimpSoft has been in negotiations with the RIAA to settle
their lawsuit out of court. The RIAA's complaint is that Pan's article
attachment decoder could be used to decode copyrighted mp3.

These negotiations have fallen through. The RIAA's final offer is that they
will drop the suit only if we unbundle Pan's attachment decoder from the
newsreader. SuperPimpSoft is unwilling to do this: the attachment decoder is
seamlessly integrated into Pan and cannot be removed.

It's in defense of the right to innovate on behalf of consumers that
SuperPimpSoft has made the painful decision to endure a lawsuit. We simply
don't think the RIAA should be involved in product design.

Our decision to stand by our principles would not have been financially
possible without the help of Andover, which has generously pledged the
support of their lawyers. (These are the same lawyers working with Slashdot
on the Slashdot/MS/Kerberos imbroglio.) Thank You!
We'll post court dates as soon as we have them. See you in court!

Carl Soderstrom
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700