There's nothing new here but it is a good roundup of the legal issues. --Declan http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/02/cyber/cyberlaw/11law.html Judge May Be Hollywood's Friend in Fight Over DVD Code By CARL S. KAPLAN After losing the first round in an important legal fight over DVD technology, lawyers for three men who have become targets of Hollywood's ire are preparing for a full-blown trial. But they concede that they face an uphill fight in the courtroom of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. Following a testy hearing in United States District Court in Manhattan late last month, the judge issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the defendants from posting a piece of software called DeCSS on the Web. The program cracks an encryption system that protects DVDs, or digital versatile discs. Judge Kaplan issued a written opinion supporting the injunction on Feb. 2, and a date for the trial will be set next month. DeCSS was developed by a group of European programmers including Jon L. Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, and it has been widely disseminated on the Internet since last October. Its creators say they wrote the software so they could watch DVD movies on computers running the free Linux operating system. But what is significant about Judge Kaplan's decision is that he said it really does not matter why someone would use DeCSS -- the software itself is illegal. ... In a sense, Judge Kaplan interpreted the copyright act as a giant moat surrounding a castle filled with copyrighted materials. Under the act, it is illegal to cross the moat, no matter what you do once you enter the castle. The judge's strict reading of the copyright act represents a second defeat for supporters of DeCSS, which include champions of the open-source software model and civil libertarians. In a separate case in California state court last month, a judge issued a preliminary injunction forcing dozens of people along with more than 400 unnamed "John Doe" defendants to stop posting copies of the DeCSS program on their Web sites. The California judge reached his conclusions on different legal grounds, however, finding that the defendants likely violated state trade-secret law. That case is still pending. The California judge declined to forbid anyone from linking to a site that posts the program. ... In addition, the movie studios recently amended their complaint to include a claim that anyone who links to a site carrying the DeCSS software violates the copyright act. "That's really a quick way to kill speech on the Net," Gross said. ... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
