“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.”