July 18, 2000
Movie Studios Seek to Stop DVD Copies
At Issue Is Internet
Encryption Software
By AMY HARMON
n the first day of a case that
could test the limits of Hollywood's
control over its digital properties,
lawyers for eight movie studios yesterday urged a federal judge to stop
a Web site operator from distributing a software program that unscrambles the encryption on DVD
movie disks. The lawyers asked the
court to act before they have the
same fate as the record labels, which
have seen their songs traded freely
by millions of Internet users.
The studios are seeking to show
that Eric Corley, publisher of 2600, a
computer hacker magazine and Web
site, violated the law by posting on
his Web site, and linking to other Web
sites that do the same, a program
that breaks the code called CSS, or
Content Scrambling System, on
DVD's. Once the program, known as
DeCSS, is invoked, a movie can be
copied and sent across the Internet.
"The threat of world copying is
here and the process has begun,"
said Leon Gold, a partner with the
New York law firm of Proskauer
Rose and lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. "It will become an avalanche
unless this court acts."
A section of the federal Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
makes it illegal for anyone to offer to
the public a device that is primarily
intended to circumvent a technological barrier controlling access to a
copyright-protected work. But Mr.
Corley's lawyers argue that the law
must be balanced against the First
Amendment concept of "fair use,"
which allows consumers certain
freedoms with copyrighted works.
The case will determine whether
the new technology "fundamentally
means the end of fair use," Martin
Garbus, Mr. Corley's lead lawyer,
said in his opening statement.
The defendants have argued that
DeCSS is legitimately used to allow
people who already own DVD's to
view the discs on computers running
the Linux operating system, which
they are unable to do without descrambling the encryption.
Lewis Kaplan, the judge in the
case, granted a preliminary injunction in January that required Mr.
Corley to remove DeCSS from his
site.
Yesterday, he heard testimony
from the plaintiff's first witness, Michael Shamos, a computer science
professor at Carnegie-Mellon.
Judge Kaplan came down from the
bench to view a laptop computer on
which Mr. Shamos showed first a
DVD of "Sleepless in Seattle" and
then a copy of the DVD that he and
an assistant had descrambled with
the DeCSS program and compressed
with another program.
Mr. Shamos said the practice of using DeCSS to copy movies is on the
rise. But on cross-examination, Mr. Garbus sought to highlight how difficult the process is to perform, noting that it took Mr. Shamos and his assistant 20 hours to obtain the compressed, unscrambled version of the movie.
"Would you agree with me that this is very tough stuff?" Mr. Garbus asked.
"It is not fun," Mr. Shamos acknowledged.
