DVD Encryption Lawsuit Dropped 

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In a rare retreat, a film industry coalition has dropped its trade secret court battle against a San Francisco computer programmer who in 1999 posted on the Internet code that cracks movie copy-protection technology.

But the coalition promised more battles ahead.

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never settle.

"We are not backing off," Robert Sugarman, an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association, said Friday. "We are exploring different routes."

The association, an arm of Hollywood studios, sued Andrew Bunner and hundreds of others four years ago, claiming their Web postings of the DVD encryption-cracking code violated the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act and helped users replicate thousands of copyright movies per day.

In papers filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court and the 6th District Court of Appeal in San Jose on Wednesday, the association requested a case dismissal.

The move came one month after an appellate court in Norway upheld the acquittal of Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teen who actually cracked the DVD encryption code. He had been charged with data break-in.

Sugarman said the Norwegian acquittal was not a factor in the decision.

The Bunner case was but one battle in the larger war the movie industry has waged in trying to prevent what it considers unauthorized usage of its content. Other legal tactics include lawsuits over alleged copyright law violations, as well as stepped up enforcement of illegal recording in movie theaters.

Dropping the case against Bunner reflects only a shift in legal strategy, the DVD association said in a statement. It said it is considering taking action to enforce patents on its encryption technology.

The movie industry also hopes to win its other pending legal battles, namely a copyright case against 321 Studios, the maker of a popular DVD-copying software program.

In the Bunner case, which became a battleground of trade secret rights versus free speech, a San Jose judge ordered the 26-year-old programmer to remove the decryption code -- known as DeCSS -- from his Internet site.

An appellate court ruling later lifted that injunction but was then overturned in August by the California Supreme Court, which sided with the DVD association, saying removal of the code did not violate constitutional free speech clauses.

Still unresolved, however, was the question of whether the code constituted a protected trade secret given its widespread exposure.

Bunner's attorneys with the Electronic Frontier Foundation heralded the DVD association's dropping of the case as a victory.

"We think that this case was always a weak trade secret claim," said Gwen Hinze, an EFF staff attorney. The DeCSS code "is not a trade secret. It's been available all around the world on hundreds of thousands of Web sites since 1999."

Bunner was the only one among hundreds sued who actively defended the trade secret lawsuit, Sugarman said, but a dismissal will mean all the others will also be off the hook.

Bunner maintained that his actions were lawful and that he put the information on the Web to allow others to play DVDs on their computers and not just on their DVD players.

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