“A coalition of motion picture and high-tech heavyweights has
sued 71 individuals and Web sites for allegedly circulating a
program online that lets people crack the security on digital movie
discs….”
“The goal…was not to give piraters the ability to copy
DVDs; it was simply to play DVDs under Linux, an operating system
the film industry forgot in their efforts to accelerate the
proliferation of DVDs in the market,” wrote defendant
John-Victor Kew II in a message on his Web site.”
“Defendants and their supporters, including cyber rights
advocate the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), noted the DeCSS
program was created using legal Reverse-engineering techniques and
called efforts to make the program unavailable an attack on free
speech.”