Last year, StorageTek (soon to be a subsidiary of Sun) brought a suit against Custom Hardware Engineering, alleging copyright and DMCA violations. CHE is a third-party maintenance vendor which was offering maintenance services for StorageTek’s tape libraries. To carry out that maintenance, CHE built a gadget which would intercept diagnostic messages sent within the library; CHE also had to bypass StorageTek’s “GetKey” system which protected access to those messages. StorageTek claimed that running the maintenance code (which generates the diagnostic messages) was a copyright violation, and that bypassing GetKey went against the DMCA’s anticircumvention measures. A U.S. district court agreed, and issued an injunction shutting CHE’s maintenance service (for these libraries) down.
Link: Linux Weekly News
