Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Studios Cracking Back At DVD Hackers In Court
Hollywood studios are celebrating two key legal victories in their fight to keep the formula that cracks the DVD encryption code off the Internet. A federal judge in New York has granted the film industry's motion for a restraining order against three Web sites that posted a program, De-CSS, that can be used to make illicit copies of films. The action was the first the studios have taken against a computer hacker for breaking the DVD encryption code and putting it on the Internet. In a separate ruling Friday [January 21, 2000], a Santa Clara, California, judge ordered nearly 30 named sites registered in the United States to remove the program. The motion was brought by trade organization DVD Copy Control Association, which sued the Web site operators for what it said amounted to trade-secret theft. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge William Elfving issued a preliminary injunction barring the sites from offering De-CSS to users. Internet activists said the decision abridged the operators' free speech rights, but Elfving did not see it as a First Amendment issue. ""If the court does not immediately enjoin the posting of this proprietary information, the (industry's) right to protect this information as a secret will surely be lost,"" Elfving wrote.