Victory for DVD Code Cracking

After some battle in court finaly the verdict is that the code to descramble dvd`s falls under pure speech," and citing the First Amendment, the court reversed a trial court's order to block the code from appearing on the Web.

This is a great decision -- the court recognized that the First Amendment prevails even when people claim trade secret laws," said Robin Gross, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who represented defendants in the case. "They were also clear that computer code is pure speech worthy of First Amendment protection."

The California case began in late 1999, when the DVD Copy Control Association (DVDCCA), and movie industry trade group, sued Andrew Bunner, a Web developer, and numerous other unnamed individuals for posting and linking to the DeCSS code on the Web.

The DVDCCA said the defendants were using "confidential proprietary information" and were therefore violating movie companies' trade secrets.

The question of whether computer code is speech has been debated for a while in the tech community.

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Source: Wired