Source: Phillips Business Information, DVD REPORT, Vol. 5, No. 4, Copyright Phillips Publishing, Inc.
Eight Studios Attack DeCSS In Copyright Lawsuit
Hollywood has put its foot down on the DeCSS front, filing lawsuits in New York and Connecticut aimed at Web sites that allegedly propagated the recent crack of the DVD format's content scrambling system (CSS). The suit comes on the heels of related action taken by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) in California Superior Court. Eight different studios are plaintiffs in the new complaint, which alleges that four defendants violated the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to distribute any product that bypasses encryption protecting copyrighted material. Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing the defendants in the case, responded that the EFF has expected to challenge the constitutionality of the DMCA for some time. The EFF has called the DMCA ""a backdoor attempt to outlaw encryption research and hence encryption."" The MPAA suit may be the first case to test the DMCA on free speech grounds. A key question in any legal action aimed at blocking DeCSS is whether the crack was intended to facilitate piracy of DVD discs, as the Motion Picture Association of America contends, or if it was a legal act of reverse engineering aimed at creating a DVD playback system for the unsupported Linux platform. Theft Or Science? ""This is a case of theft,"" MPAA CEO Jack Valenti said in a prepared statement. ""The posting of the de-encryption formula is no different from making and then distributing unauthorized keys to a department store. The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets."" EFF Executive Director Tara Lemmey shot back, ""These cases are not about piracy or hacking. They are about censorship of speech critical to science, education and innovation. Reverse engineering of DVD security is legitimate and important for systems interoperability, and a right that we must preserve ...."" The plaintiffs in the case include Universal, Paramount, MGM, TriStar, Columbia, Time Warner, Disney, and Fox. The defendants named in New York are Eric Corley (better known as Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of the venerable hacker journal 2600), Shawn C. Remeirdes, and Roman Kazan, and in Connecticut, Jeraimee Hughes. The complaints allege that all four defendants have offered DeCSS to the public at their Web sites. Goldstein's publication was also named as a defendant in the California lawsuit. The New York and Connecticut suits seek an injunction against the distribution of DeCSS as well as damages of $2500 ""for each act of circumvention"" of CSS, plus attorneys' fees and court costs. The first hearing in that case took place January 20 in New York. California Judge Delays Injunction Ruling A request for a temporary restraining order against distribution of DeCSS was denied in the DVD CCA (the CSS licensing authority) lawsuit against close to 100 Web site operators. That lawsuit is fundamentally different from the one filed on January 14 because it alleges misappropriation of trade secrets, a different issue from the copyright-protection legislation cited by the Hollywood studios. A second hearing was held in California last week to argue the merits of a preliminary injunction against the defendants. As DVD Report went to press, the judge had not yet decided whether to order the defendants to stop distributing DeCSS. No matter the outcome of both cases, it's unlikely that favorable rulings will salvage the current encryption scheme for DVD content. Even if the DeCSS program never made another appearance on all of the Web sites named, it's already been downloaded by countless users worldwide, along with information on how CSS works. Meanwhile, supporters of DeCSS have challenged themselves to devise novel ways of distributing the program's source code, including printing it on T-shirts and hiding it in data that's downloaded to the cache of a Web browser without the user's knowledge.