IP: Advocacy group fights ruling on DVD c

[David Farber <dfarber () fast net>]

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Advocacy group fights ruling on
DVD cracking case
Advocacy group fights ruling on DVD cracking case
By Lisa M. Bowman
Special to CNET News.com
January 19, 2001, 1:00 p.m. PT
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking a federal appeals court to
overturn a ruling that banned a Web site from posting and linking to a
software program that can crack DVD security, saying the decision did "great
violence" to the First Amendment.
In August, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
struck a major blow to online hacker publication 2600 by declaring it was
illegal to publish information about--or hyperlinks to--a controversial
program known as DeCSS.

DeCSS is a program that cracks the code designed to protect the content on
DVDs from being copied--for either legal or illicit uses. The motion picture
industry fears that the new technology could cause it to lose control of the
distribution of its movies.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing 2600
Enterprises, wants the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to reject the lower
court's ruling as an "unconstitutional restraint on free speech" because it
blocks people from using DeCSS for purposes that aren't illegal, such as
criticism or reverse engineering for educational purposes.
The legal battle started when the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) sued 2600 and several other Web sites, saying that publishing
information about DeCSS was illegal because it let people violate
copyrights. Many of the other Web sites buckled and took down the code, but
2600 fought the suit.


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