DVD Hacking Software approved in Courts

[GLADIATOR 2002]

Court Allows DVD Hacker Software

By RON HARRIS
Associated Press Writer
DVD player
AP/ [8K]
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Using the Internet to publish software code used for decrypting and copying digital movies is protected by the First Amendment as an expression free speech, a California appeals court ruled.

The San Jose-based 6th District Court of Appeal found Thursday that Andrew Bunner's publishing of links to a software program called DeCSS on his Web site represented ``pure speech'' protected under the First Amendment.

The three-judge panel's overturned a lower court injunction barring the program from being published by the defendants, though it is still widely available on various Internet Web sites.

``Regardless of who authored the program, DeCSS is a written expression of the author's ideas and information about the decryption of DVDs,'' the judges wrote.

DeCSS allows users to unlock the security code on DVDs and copy the movies to personal computers.

Bunner and several others were sued in December of 1999 by the DVD Copy Control Association, a trade association of businesses in the movie industry, for allegedly violating trade secrets.

Bunner and the other defendants maintained DeCSS was merely created to allow DVDs to be viewable on computers running the Linux operating system for which there were no legal DVD decoder programs.

One of the movie industry's fears was that once the video files could be extracted from DVDs, they could be pirated like MP3 music files over the Internet using file-swapping software such as Napster. The large size of the video files made that impractical at first, but now several programs are available that compress those large video files to one-tenth their original size.

Entire movies can now be downloaded over file-sharing networks and burned to writeable CDs thanks to DeCSS.

The court acknowledged that DeCSS contains the trade secret algorithms to decode DVDs, but still ruled against the industry, saying the code did not fall into any of the established free speech exceptions such as being lewd or libelous.

``Although the social value of DeCSS may be questionable, it is nonetheless pure speech,'' the court wrote.

The DVDCCA said it would appeal the decision.

A federal appeals court is weighing the same issue. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York is reviewing a federal judge's order prohibiting a Web site creator from posting codes that unscramble DVD encryption.

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[vitualis]

Hardly "approved".

I thought that the ruling was actually that linking/publishing the SOURCE CODE to DECSS (rather than an actual program) would be allowed as an "expression of free speech". But that "object code" (or something like that -- refering to a compiled proggy) would not.

Regards.