Expert Attorney Takes DeCSS Case, Judge Delays Trial

6-Apr-00

Defendants in the MPAA's New York lawsuit attacking DeCSS won a victory of sorts last week, pushing the trial date to December 5, 2000 and retaining the services of famed First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus. The trial had originally been set to begin May 1, but the defendants successfully argued that more time was needed to prepare their defense. Garbus, a mainstay of the publishing industry who has represented such figures as Lenny Bruce and Vaclav Havel, was hired with funds from free speech advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The defendants in the DeCSS case have argued long and loud that the program they've distributed over the Web is Constitutionally protected speech. The MPAA says it facilitates the illegal duplication of DVDs, while programmers say it assures interoperability with the Linux platform. Because both claims seem to hold merit, the actual trial should prove interesting. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan exhibited little patience with the defense at a preliminary hearing where he granted a preliminary injunction against distribution of DeCSS. With the arrival of Garbus on the scene, Kaplan's decision to delay the trial by seven months may indicate a softening of his stance. The New York lawsuit by the MPAA followed on the heels of legal action taken late last year by the DVD Copy Control Association (the CSS licensing authority), which won a preliminary injunction against the distribution of DeCSS on the Web sites of nearly 100 defendants. That lawsuit alleges misappropriation of trade secrets, while the New York suit claim that defendants violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by distributing a program that circumvents DVD's anti-pracy system. Another DMCA case was brought by the MPAA against a defendant in Connecticut. Source: DVD Report