TECHNOLOGY; Judges Weigh Copyright Suit On Unlocking DVD Shield (original) (raw)
Business|TECHNOLOGY; Judges Weigh Copyright Suit On Unlocking DVD Shield
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TECHNOLOGY
- May 2, 2001
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May 2, 2001
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Section C, Page
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A lawyer for the Web magazine 2600 urged a federal appeals court in Manhattan yesterday to find unconstitutional a 1998 law that seeks to limit the unauthorized copying of digitized material.
The closely watched case, which pits a hacker Web site against eight leading movie studios, is the first major challenge to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law is aimed at updating copyright law for an age when copying music, movies and books in digital form is much easier and less expensive than ever. The provision at issue specifically prohibits the dissemination of devices capable of breaking the technological wrappers intended to prevent the copying of digital material.
A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is weighing whether to overturn a lower court ruling that prohibits the site, www.2600.com, from publishing or linking to DeCSS, a computer program that can crack the security system on DVD movies. Once the disc with the movie has been unlocked, an individual can copy it to a computer hard drive and use another program to shrink it into a format that can be distributed over the Internet.
The movie studios sued Eric Corley, the publisher of 2600, in January 2000 after he posted DeCSS on his Web site and linked to other sites distributing the program. At the time, Mr. Corley said he wanted to make the program available to users of the Linux operating system, who could not play store-bought DVD's on their computers without first breaking their digital lock. (The DVD's work on the Windows operating system, but not on Linux.) The lower court issued an injunction against Mr. Corley's site in August.
At the core of the case is the question of whether the Digital Millennium Copyright Act violates the First Amendment by blocking even the limited uses of copyrighted material now permitted for purposes like scholarship, criticism or parody.
Yesterday, Kathleen Sullivan, the dean of Stanford Law School who is representing Mr. Corley, compared the lower court's injunction to prohibiting the publication of blueprints to build a copying machine. Although a copying machine could be used for copyright infringement, it also has many other legitimate uses, Ms. Sullivan argued.
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