******** Decision is at: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/00-08117.PDF Final judgment and order: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/00-08118.PDF ******** http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38287,00.html Studios Score DeCSS Victory by Declan McCullagh ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 11:40 a.m. Aug. 17, 2000 PDT LOS ANGELES -- A DVD-descrambling program is akin to a virulent Internet epidemic that must be eradicated, a federal judge said Thursday as he agreed with Hollywood that DVDs must be protected from decryption and copying. Comparing the DeCSS utility to a "common-source outbreak epidemic," U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said "there is little room for doubting that broad dissemination of DeCSS threatens ultimately to injure or destroy plaintiffs' ability to distribute their copyrighted products on DVDs, and, for that matter, undermine their ability to sell their products to the home video market in other forms." The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in New York, and a similar one pending in state court in California, are part of an aggressive campaign by Hollywood to protect its content from illicit distribution online. The Napster file-trading service has come under attack, as have iCraveTV and Scour.net. Kaplan's 93-page ruling against hacker-zine 2600 Magazine, which eight movie studios sued after it posted DeCSS on its website, likely will have far-reaching effects in the computer industry. It prevents 2600 from not only distributing copies of DeCSS, but also linking to Web pages or areas of a website where it resides. That could affect other online news organizations, which have occasionally linked to DeCSS as part of their coverage of the lawsuit. "I'm very troubled by the implications of the analysis in this case, particularly with regard to linking," said Stuart Biegel, a senior lecturer at the UCLA School of Law. "The distinction set forth in this opinion between different types of linking is a nebulous one." The Motion Picture Association of America, which has backed the lawsuit, applauded the ruling. "Today's landmark decision nailed down an indispensable constitutional and congressional truth: It's wrong to help others steal creative works," MPAA president Jack Valenti said in a statement. "The court's ruling is a victory for consumers and for legitimate technology." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has paid for the legal defense of 2600 publisher Emmanuel Goldstein, said it would appeal the ruling. Kaplan's decision, if upheld on appeal, could endanger not just websites distributing DeCSS -- and there seem to be thousands of them -- but efforts by the Linux community to develop an open-source DVD player. The LiViD project, for instance, is attempting to build a modular suite of software DVD players, and to do that, programmers incorporated the same code used in DeCSS. Kaplan's order said that anyone acting "in concert" with 2600 is prohibited from distributing or linking to any program that circumvents the DVD-protection algorithm called CSS. "Now the MPAA has an avenue to go around bullying anyone offering the LiViD project files, simply by making an argument that they're operating in conjunction with 2600, and 2600 has been enjoined from posting any CSS code, not just the infamous DeCSS.exe," wrote one irate poster on an open-source-related mailing list. [...]
