Audio Video News

A lower court injunction barring the DVD-cracking program known as DeCSS from being published has been overturned by a three-judge panel of California's Sixth District Court of Appeal in San Jose.

The judicial panel determined on Thursday, November 1 that publishing software that can be used to decrypt and copy movies in the digital format is a form of free speech, protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. DeCSS, which allows users to unlock copy-prevention code on DVDs and copy movies or other content to personal computers, was developed by a teenage computer hacker in Norway who "reverse-engineered" DVD copy-prevention code. DeCSS has been propagated worldwide via the Internet.

Publishing the program has been found by other courts to be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other copyright law. The three California appeals court judges disagreed with such findings, stating, "Regardless of who authored the program, DeCSS is a written expression of the author's ideas and information about the decryption of DVDs," and as such, is protected under the First Amendment. "Although the social value of DeCSS may be questionable, it is nonetheless pure speech," the judges wrote.

The decision was reached in the case of Andrew Bunner and his associates, who were sued in December 1999 by the DVD Copy Control Association for violating trade secrets. The defendants stated that DeCSS was created primarily to allow Linux-based computers to play DVDs, not to enable copyright violations. The Bunner case, and others like it in New York and elsewhere, are part of an ongoing campaign by the entertainment industry to contain or inhibit piracy. The DVD Copy Control Association said it would appeal the Sixth District Court's decision.