people who operated the websites containing the infringing material, and the defendants did not
receive any kind of compensation from the linked websites.^1134
By contrast, in the instant case, the court noted that Comcast had alleged that Hightech
received compensation from the website operators that linked to 1-satellite-dish.com. In
addition, the court found that Net Results, as the domain server of websites selling illegal cable
equipment, could possibly be engaging in trafficking under the DMCA because it was allegedly
assisting sellers of illegal cable equipment in distributing such equipment. The court therefore
concluded that Comcast had sufficiently stated a claim against the defendants under the DMCA
in trafficking or acting in concert with a person who had manufactured or distributed illicit
circumvention equipment, and denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the DMCA claims.^1135
(xiii) Davidson & Assocs. v. Internet GatewayFor a discussion of this case, which found violations of both the anti-circumvention and
trafficking prohibitions of Section 1201, see Section II.G.1(g)(5) above.
(xiv) Agfa Monotype Corp. v. Adobe Sys.This case addressed the issue of whether a passive bit or flag indicating the copyright
owner’s preference with respect to copying or distribution constitutes an effective technological
access control measure or measure protecting copyright rights, and held that it does not. The
plaintiffs were the copyright owners in about 3,300 copyrighted TrueType fonts. The plaintiffs
alleged that Version 5 of Adobe’s Acrobat product violated the anti-circumvention provisions of
the DMCA because it ignored the “embedding bits” in certain of the plaintiffs’ fonts that
indicated whether the fonts were licensed for editing.^1136
Adobe Acrobat 5.0 was capable of embedding fonts into portable electronic documents
stored in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). The court described the technology of font
embedding as follows:
A font is copied when it is embedded. Fonts are embedded through embedding
bits. Embedding bits indicate to other programs capable of reading them, such as
Adobe Acrobat, the font embedding licensing rights that the font vendor granted
with respect to the particular font. The software application decides whether or
not to embed the font based upon the embedding bit. An embedding bit cannot be
read by a computer program until that program has already accessed the font data
file. TrueType Fonts are not encrypted, scrambled, or authenticated. A TrueType
Font data file can be accessed regardless of the font’s embedding permissions. A(^1134) Id.
(^1135) Id. at 37,233-34.
(^1136) Agfa Monotype Corp. v. Adobe Sys., 404 F. Supp. 2d 1030, 1031-32 (N.D. Ill. 2005).