CNET News.com: Film industry fights DVD decryption sites

Jan 21, 2000, 20:11 (2 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Sandeep Junnarkar)

"The Motion Picture Association of America is gaining ground this week in its ongoing campaign to eliminate a program that cracks the security on DVDs."

"The movie industry trade group has sent out an additional 500 cease-and-desist letters to Web site operators accusing them of violating U.S. copyright law, after chalking up a victory in the Southern District of New York yesterday. Federal judge Lewis Kaplan issued a preliminary injunction against three defendants sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for the distribution of the de-scrambling program on the Internet...."

"The motion picture industry has been on a warpath for about six months, sending letters to hundreds of Web sites ordering them to remove the "offending" code or links to it. The MPAA started its battle after a 16-year-old Norwegian student posted code known as DeCSS on a Web site that theoretically would allow a user with a DVD drive on his or her PC to make copies of DVD movies and store them on the PC's hard drive or copy them to rewritable CD-ROMs."

Complete Story

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• Wired: DVD Case: Battle of the Basics(Jan 21, 2000)
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