“The movie industry, through its recently activiated Digital
Video Disc Content Control Association (DVD CCA), a trade
organization controlling DVD patents, has filed a lawsuit in
California against dozens of people around the world. who have
published information, or links to information, about the DVD
Content Scrambling System (CSS), on the Internet. As many as 500
defendants could eventually be named. The DVD CCA claims that the
defendants are violating the association’s trade secrets and other
intellectual property rights by posting the source code of (or
simply having links to other sites with the source code of) a
legally reverse-engineered means of decoding DVD discs. An
important hearing in the case has been scheduled for tomorrow,
Wed., Dec. 29, 1999.”
“Tomorrow’s hearing is on whether the judge should issue a
temporary restraining order against the defendants, who have been
publishing information about the DVD content scrambling system in
various locations in the US and worldwide. Any such order, if
issued, would only apply for a few weeks, while the parties argued
in court about whether a permanent injunction should restrict these
defendants from publishing this information for the duration of the
court case.”
“It is EFF’s opinion that this lawsuit is an attempt to
architect law to favor a particular business model at the expense
of free expression. It is an affront to the First Amendment (and UN
human rights accords) because the information the programmers
posted is legal. EFF also objects to the DVD CCA’s attempt to
blur the distinction between posting material on one’s own Web site
and merely linking to it (i.e., providing directions to it)
elsewhere.”