Judge Halts Spread Of Hacked DVD Code

The ruling, by Judge Lewis Kaplan, came at the request of the Motion Picture Association of America and several major film studios. It is not directly related to a separate California suit filed by the DVD Copy Control Association. In the latter suit, filed against 72 Web site owners, a judge has denied a temporary restraining order and heard arguments this past Tuesday (January 18) regarding a possible preliminary injunction. While the DVD CCA case hinges on trade secret disclosure, the MPAA case involves copyright infringement. The plaintiffs claim that DeCSS violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by allowing circumvention of copy-shielding technology. Development of such technology is explicitly forbidden by the DMCA, an MPAA spokesman said. DeCSS supporters say that the program's sole function is to play DVDs on Linux-based machines, but the MPAA says the program's purpose is irrelevant. ""They do not have permission to decrypt the encryption,"" the MPAA spokesman said. ""You could have lots of good reasons to run a red light, but you're still breaking the law."" The MPAA has filed a second case in Connecticut but hasn't yet received a decision, the association's spokesman said. Judge Kaplan's preliminary injunction prohibits Shawn C. Reimerdes, Roman Kazan and Eric Corley from distributing any CSS-thwarting technology. Most notably, the three are forbidden from posting DeCSS code on the Internet. Corley, who operates the 2600 magazine and Web site under the name Emmanuel Goldstein, has complied with the order, saying he was threatened with immediate imprisonment otherwise. On his Web site, he characterizes the injunction as a rush job, noting that the complaint was filed late on Friday, January 14 - the day before a three-day weekend, and a day when Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lawyers representing the defendants were busy preparing arguments for the separate California case. ""This calculated and bullying move minimized media coverage and ensured that any publicity was only from [the plaintiffs'] perspective,"" Corley wrote. ""We were given a grand total of about eight hours to consult with our attorneys, look for evidence, and write a declaration."" The MPAA issued a statement in which Chief Executive Jack Valenti called Judge Kaplan's decision ""a great victory for creative artists, consumers and copyright owners everywhere."" But the EFF has countered, saying that the decision poses a grave threat to fair-use laws and to the open-source community in general. ""If Judge Kaplan's reading of the DMCA holds, then it will become illegal to build open source products that can interoperate and/or compete with proprietary ones for displaying copyrighted content,"" said EFF cofounder John Gilmore in a statement.