FC: DVD judge may be Hollywood's friend --Kaplan/NYT

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

There's nothing new here but it is a good roundup of the legal issues. --Declan



http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/02/cyber/cyberlaw/11law.html

Judge May Be Hollywood's Friend in Fight Over DVD Code
By CARL S. KAPLAN

 After losing the first round in an important legal fight over DVD
 technology, lawyers for three men who have become targets of
 Hollywood's ire are preparing for a full-blown trial. But they
 concede that they face an uphill fight in the courtroom of Judge
 Lewis A. Kaplan.

 Following a testy hearing in United States District
 Court in Manhattan late last month, the judge
 issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the
 defendants from posting a piece of software
 called DeCSS on the Web. The program cracks
 an encryption system that protects DVDs, or
 digital versatile discs. Judge Kaplan issued a
 written opinion supporting the injunction on Feb.
 2, and a date for the trial will be set next month.

 DeCSS was developed by a group of European
 programmers including Jon L. Johansen, a
 Norwegian teenager, and it has been widely
 disseminated on the Internet since last October.
 Its creators say they wrote the software so they could watch DVD movies
 on computers running the free Linux operating system. But what is
 significant about Judge Kaplan's decision is that he said it
 really does not matter why someone would use DeCSS -- the software
 itself is illegal.

...

 In a sense, Judge Kaplan interpreted
 the copyright act as a giant moat
 surrounding a castle filled with
 copyrighted materials. Under the act,
 it is illegal to cross the moat, no matter
 what you do once you enter the castle.

 The judge's strict reading of the
 copyright act represents a second
 defeat for supporters of DeCSS,
 which include champions of the open-source software model
 and civil libertarians. In a separate case in California state
 court last month, a judge issued a preliminary injunction
 forcing dozens of people along with more than 400 unnamed "John
 Doe" defendants to stop posting copies of the DeCSS program on
 their Web sites. The California judge reached his conclusions on
 different legal grounds, however, finding that the defendants
 likely violated state trade-secret law. That case is still pending. The
 California judge declined to forbid anyone from linking to a site
 that posts the program.

...

 In addition, the movie studios recently amended their complaint to include a
 claim that anyone who links to a site carrying the DeCSS software violates
 the copyright act. "That's really a quick way to kill speech on the Net,"
 Gross said.

...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology
To subscribe: send a message to majordomo () vorlon mit edu with this text:
subscribe politech
More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------