“Does the DVD-decrypting DeCSS do for video what Napster did
for music, and can copyright law stop it?“
“Eric Corley, better known to his friends as Emmanuel or “Manny”
Goldstein, tends to keep his hands in his pockets and his eyes
aimed at the floor. The editor of 2600, the hacker quarterly, may
be the latest hacker icon — he is, after all, on trial here this
week, sued by eight movie studios for distributing DeCSS, a program
that decrypts DVDs so people can play them on Linux-based operating
systems — but outside the courtroom Monday, he was soft-spoken and
polite. When one young, black-clad hacker gushed, “I just need to
shake your hand,” Goldstein obliged quietly, his long, curly hair
draping a wrinkled forehead and downward glance.”
“Get him talking about the need to protect DeCSS, which a judge
outlawed late last year, however, or the public’s right to
distribute it, and you’ll see a pair of burning brown eyes and an
entirely more vocal man. Before cameras, critics and supporters
this week, Goldstein continues to argue that DeCSS is not a tool
for piracy as the studios claim, but rather the only mechanism that
allows you to play a DVD on a computer running Linux. And the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law that appears to make
illegal DeCSS technology simply because it circumvents copyright
control, is, he says, nothing less than a colossal mistake.”