Audio Video News

Civil libertarians and computer hackers are united in their opposition to a ruling last summer by US District Judge Lewis Kaplan that banned the posting or propagation of DeCSS. The code, named for its ability to unlock DVD's Content Scrambling System, enables the copying of DVDs. In his ruling, Judge Kaplan ordered website 2600 to remove not only the code, but also links to other sites where curious visitors might find it.

In the wake of the ruling, publishing the code is an illegal act, which upsets those who consider the restriction an infringement of freedom of speech. The film industry breathed a sigh of relief, but creative types have found ways to convey the message without actually printing the code that Judge Kaplan banned. Among the solutions: a short movie in which the code scrolls into the distance like the opening scene from Star Wars, poems, songs, games, and graphic creations which use the code as design elements—all of them forms of free speech protected by the First Amendment, their creators say.

Carnegie Mellon University professor David Touretzky has built two online galleries (1, 2) where many of these works can be seen. The band Don't Eat Pete has recorded a song, "DVD descrambled," which can be heard online. A meticulous hacker could use the information contained in such works to recreate the descrambling code and thereby violate Hollywood's copyrights, or defeat region coding that prevents DVDs released in one part of the world from being played elsewhere.

The film industry isn't likely to go after these creations or their creators, according to attorney Charles Sims, who successfully pursued the industry's case against 2600. "The fact is that many of the things Professor Touretzky is talking about don't present the same kind of harm to content owners that the executable DeCSS utility does," Sims says. None of them are "the sort of thing that content companies would spend money pursuing." Nonetheless, legal scholars disagree as to whether they are violations of Kaplan's ruling, and whether his ruling is constitutional. An appeal is in process.