FC: Judge sides with Hollywood in DVD descrambling/DMCA case

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Decision is at:
http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/00-08117.PDF

Final judgment and order:
http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/00-08118.PDF

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http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38287,00.html

   Studios Score DeCSS Victory
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)

   11:40 a.m. Aug. 17, 2000 PDT
   LOS ANGELES -- A DVD-descrambling program is akin to a virulent
   Internet epidemic that must be eradicated, a federal judge said
   Thursday as he agreed with Hollywood that DVDs must be protected from
   decryption and copying.

   Comparing the DeCSS utility to a "common-source outbreak epidemic,"
   U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said "there is little room for
   doubting that broad dissemination of DeCSS threatens ultimately to
   injure or destroy plaintiffs' ability to distribute their copyrighted
   products on DVDs, and, for that matter, undermine their ability to
   sell their products to the home video market in other forms."

   The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in New York, and a
   similar one pending in state court in California, are part of an
   aggressive campaign by Hollywood to protect its content from illicit
   distribution online. The Napster file-trading service has come under
   attack, as have iCraveTV and Scour.net.

   Kaplan's 93-page ruling against hacker-zine 2600 Magazine, which eight
   movie studios sued after it posted DeCSS on its website, likely will
   have far-reaching effects in the computer industry.

   It prevents 2600 from not only distributing copies of DeCSS, but also
   linking to Web pages or areas of a website where it resides. That
   could affect other online news organizations, which have occasionally
   linked to DeCSS as part of their coverage of the lawsuit.

   "I'm very troubled by the implications of the analysis in this case,
   particularly with regard to linking," said Stuart Biegel, a senior
   lecturer at the UCLA School of Law. "The distinction set forth in this
   opinion between different types of linking is a nebulous one."

   The Motion Picture Association of America, which has backed the
   lawsuit, applauded the ruling.

   "Today's landmark decision nailed down an indispensable constitutional
   and congressional truth: It's wrong to help others steal creative
   works," MPAA president Jack Valenti said in a statement. "The court's
   ruling is a victory for consumers and for legitimate technology."

   The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has paid for the legal
   defense of 2600 publisher Emmanuel Goldstein, said it would appeal the
   ruling.

   Kaplan's decision, if upheld on appeal, could endanger not just
   websites distributing DeCSS -- and there seem to be thousands of them
   -- but efforts by the Linux community to develop an open-source DVD
   player.

   The LiViD project, for instance, is attempting to build a modular
   suite of software DVD players, and to do that, programmers
   incorporated the same code used in DeCSS.

   Kaplan's order said that anyone acting "in concert" with 2600 is
   prohibited from distributing or linking to any program that
   circumvents the DVD-protection algorithm called CSS.

   "Now the MPAA has an avenue to go around bullying anyone offering the
   LiViD project files, simply by making an argument that they're
   operating in conjunction with 2600, and 2600 has been enjoined from
   posting any CSS code, not just the infamous DeCSS.exe," wrote one
   irate poster on an open-source-related mailing list.

   [...]