A US appeals court in New York will tomorrow hear a case concerning
the legality of linking to and publishing on-line a piece of code,
called DeCSS, that can be used to crack the anti-copying code of
DVDs, known as CSS (Content Scrambling System).
A lower court has already ruled that Eric Corely, publisher of
the hacker magazine 2600, breached the terms of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 when his magazine posted
the short piece of code on-line and linked to other web sites that
also posted it. The case was brought by the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA), fearing that the code’s display
would make illegal downloads of movies widely available on the
internet.
DeCSS was written by a Norwegian teenager who claimed he had to
break the security of DVDs to be able to watch movies on his PC
because CSS security was not compatible with the Linux operating
system which he used.
Corely and 2600, represented by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, have taken the case to the Second Circuit US Court of
Appeals, arguing that freedom of speech justified it in posting and
linking to the code. The district court, ruling against 2600, had
said that code is not free speech; a previous case over the posting
of encryption code on-line ruled that, depending on the
circumstances, it can be.
Full details of the case and its history can be found at
2600.com.
