Back in 1999, a judge's order ruled publishing of a DeCSS tool by Johansen on the web illegal as the DVD Copy Control Association had argued that it violated their property rights. On Friday, a California appeals court had reversed the 1999 this ruling as the original ruling violated the defendant's free speech rights.
Last year, a criminal case against Johansen has been thrown out of court in his home country . Now Hollywood has lost its last legal attack on the Johansen's publishing of DeCSS as they also have dropped their case against him in January . However it is still not legal to publish DeCSS online in California despite the reversal of the original ruling. Implementing DeCSS in software in the US is not legal either as the DMCA legislation law prohibits the distribution of copy-protection circumvention tools and software. Last week 321 studios had to remove DeCSS support from its software as a result of a court ruling.
|
The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection companies can expect in California for trade secrets that become widely distributed online. The plaintiff, the DVD Copy Control Association, had argued that Andrew Bunner violated its intellectual property rights by posting on the Internet code known as DeCSS that can be used to bypass Hollywood's encryption scheme for DVDs. Bunner's attorneys had countered that the code was no longer a secret by the time he posted it on his Web site. On Friday, California's Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, reversing a trial judge's order first issued in 1999. "The preliminary injunction...burdens more speech than necessary to protect DVD CCA's property interest and was an unlawful prior restraint upon Bunner's right to free speech," the three-judge panel wrote in its decision. The decision ends the last strand of Hollywood's legal attack on DeCSS in the United States, an effort that began when Norwegian programmer Jon Johansen posted DeCSS on the Internet. A criminal case against Johansen in his home country was thrown out late last year. Read the full news article here. |
While DeCSS is no longer considered a trade secret in California, it looks like any software which can copy CSS protected discs by the use of DeCSS still remains illegal in both the US and California.
Back in the development stage of the DVD specification and copy-protection system, they could have easily added fair use support by developing a system where copies can be made, but where the original DVD must be loaded at least once in the player's life before copies of that DVD can be played. This would allow copies to be subject to wear and tear while having the originals should a copy become damaged. In this case should the copies become distributed, they cannot be played in another player without ever being authenticated at least once with the matching original discs. Then again, both the music and movie industry one thing in common: If you damage the original, go buy another!
Source: CNET News - The Net
