[7684] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Judge sides with Hollywood in DeCSS descrambling case
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Sat Aug 19 01:59:01 2000
Message-Id: <4.3.0.20000818001846.01b4ab40@mail.well.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 00:19:39 -0700
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: 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
********
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.
[...]
