Audio Video News

The film industry's yearlong pursuit of DVD hackers has hit a roadblock. On Thursday, December 14, the California Supreme Court issued an order that may result in the dismissal of charges against several defendants accused of promulgating a DVD decryption code known as DeCSS. Developed last year by a 16-year-old Norwegian computer hobbyist to allow DVDs to play on Linux-based PCs, the code also defeats copy prptection. CSS (copy scrambling system) is built into DVD movies and software to prevent illegal copying.

An industry organization known as the DVD Copy Control Association sued almost two dozen hackers for either posting the decryption code or creating links to sites where it could be downloaded, but the state's Supreme Court ruling implies that they may be outside the state's jurisdiction. Eighteen of the twenty-one defendants listed in the suit do not live in California.

Suits brought by the association include one in New York, claiming that distributing DeCSS is a violation of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In that case, defendant Eric Corley has been ordered not to put links to DeCSS on his Web site. The California suit claims that such distribution is a violation of trade secrets law.

The California Supreme Court ruling was intended to clarify the status of defendant Matthew Pavlovich, according to his attorney, Allon Levy. "This is an important case for free speech on the Internet," Levy said. "The defendants are not alleged to have created the code but only to have found it and republished it. The standard [relating to] how you know it's been misappropriated is very vague."

Many software developers believe that "reverse engineering" is an important part of the product development cycle, but DVD manufacturers have made users of their CSS copy-prevention software sign so-called click-wrap licenses, promising that they will not reverse-engineer the software. Levy has argued that such licenses are in opposition to California law, that the court has no jurisdiction outside California, and that the plaintiffs' definition of a license violation is poorly defined. Legal wrangling over DeCSS is expected to continue through the winter.