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October 31, 2007: Filing Second Amended Complaint

On October 31st, 2007, we filed a motion requesting leave to file a second amended complaint. This is a necessary step, ordered by the Court, toward getting the new complaint before the Court. The motion includes two proposed versions. We believe that our cybersquatting claim for Katzer's misuse of the decoderpro.com domain name is a valid one, and we now have the hearing transcript that proves we did not waive this claim. We're therefore asking the Court to allow us to file a version which includes cybersquating. In the interest of time, however, we've also included a version without that claim if the Court continues to believe that we've waived it. In that case, we're asking the Court to allow us to go forward with the version of the complaint without the cybersquatting claim, and to declare the decision on that final so that we can appeal it.

We included a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You might wonder what DMCA has to do with open source software. DMCA has two main statutes. Section 1201 is the one which has to do with circumvention, and it is used more frequently of the two statutes. Many people in open-source and free software communities hate this section, for good reason. We are NOT suing under section 1201. Then there's Section 1202, rarely used so far, which forbids providing false copyright management information or removing copyright management information. We believe that Katzer's removal of JMRI copyright notices, author's names, and license terms -- which qualify as copyright management information -- from our machine-readable XML decoder definitions is a violation of Sec. 1202. We believe this section is a great weapon we can use against Katzer to protect our intellectual property rights, so we charged Katzer and his company with a violation of this section. If we succeed, it will allow other open source groups to invoke this section to defend their intellectual property, and to obtain statutory damages and attorneys fees.

Katzer's lawyer has already said he doesn't object to either version, so we expect this will be straight-forward.

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