DVD Lawsuit Spreads Its Own ""Trade Secrets""

Following an apparent blunder by attorneys for the DVD industry, a California superior court judge Wednesday placed under seal industry-spawned court documents that revealed the selfsame ""trade secrets"" that the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD- CCA) is suing to suppress. The DVD-CCA is embroiled in a legal battle against more than 50 Web site operators who allegedly posted information about DVD encryption codes on their sites. The industry claims that those codes are copyrighted trade secrets and is suing to suppress their dissemination over the Internet. But when the DVD-CCA - an industry-sponsored not-for-profit group charged with licensing the DVD industry's Content Scrambling System (CSS) - filed written complaints against the defendants, the organization apparently included segments of the CSS as exhibits. In so doing the DVD-CCA introduced the CSS into the public record and gravely undermined their claim that the CSS is a ""trade secret,"" a source close to the case, who demanded anonymity, told Newsbytes. ""The DVD-CCA shared their trade secret with the world,"" the source said. The Judge has obliged the DVD-CCA by sealing the documents that contained the CSS code and the full impact of the industry's foible remains unclear as of this writing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is defending the Web site operators, declined to comment on this latest wrinkle in the case and the DVD-CCA was not available for comment on this story. The EFF is fighting a war on two fronts over the DVD encryption issue. In addition to defending the 50-plus defendants in California, the organization is defending three Web site operators against similar charges brought by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in a New York federal court. The judges in both cases recently granted injunctions demanding that the defendants remove information about the CSS from their Web sites until the cases are decided. The EFF argues that the Web site operators named in the cases were exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free expression and further contends that the CSS does not meet the minimum standard for a trade secret. The DVD-CCA has made no public statements regarding the case. Many of the attempts to break the DVD industry's Content Scrambling System (CSS) stem from the fact that no DVD viewing devices have been licensed for computers running Linux and other alternative operating systems. The tech-savvy Linux community responded by working to break the protocols and develop its own devices.

Source: Newsbytes News Network. Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.