January 13, 2003<br /><br /><br />News<br /><br />Hollywood loses DVD piracy case<br /><br />A teenage software programmer in Norway has beat Hollywood in an important early round of the motion picture industry’s international struggle to control the copy protection mechanisms on commercial DVD entertainment releases.<br /><br />Jon Lech Johansen, 19, was acquitted of digital piracy in Oslo after, in 1999, developing a software application called DeCSS. The computer program empowers DVD users to unlock security codes that are designed to prevent the copying of content.<br /><br />A three-member legal panel of the Oslo City Court ruled that Johansen had broken no laws by using and distributing the software. Perhaps, more important to Hollywood, the panel found that the young defendant — as the rightful owner of the DVDs in question — was free to view and copy them in any way he chose.<br /><br />The right to view and copy legally purchased software has longtime been a right enjoyed by Americans. However, due to Hollywood’s recent political lobbying, software like DeCSS is illegal in the United States. It was made so under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law that outlaws the creation and distribution of technology that enables users to disable copyright protections on motion pictures, music and other forms of software.<br /><br />European laws are much less harsh and apparently so are international attitudes about copy protection. The Johansen case was considered a major setback for the American motion picture industry. “The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal, pirate copy,” the ruling said.<br /><br />The court found that the rights of consumers apply to legally obtained DVDs “even if the films are played in a different way than the makers had foreseen.”<br /><br />While Johansen said he was “very satisfied” with the verdict, the Motion Picture Association of America indicated it would support an appeal, which must be filed within two weeks.<br /><br />For more information visit www.mpaa.org.<br /><br /><br />The Supreme Court backs off Texas DVD case<br /><br />Hollywood received a second legal setback on DVD copy protection from the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has rescinded an emergency ruling that had prevented a U.S. Web site operator, Matthew Pavlovich, from posting a copy of DeCSS on the Internet.<br /><br />DeCSS is free software that allows anyone to play DVDs without technological restrictions, such as region codes and forced watching of commercials imposed by movie studios (See story above).<br /><br />The ruling means that Pavlovich, a Texas resident, is no longer barred by court order from distributing the DeCSS descrambling utility. However, Pavlovich said he no longer planned to do so since similar DVD decryption programs are already available on hundreds of other Web sites, and have been printed in magazines and newspapers.<br /><br />“The entertainment companies need to stop pretending that DeCSS is a secret,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a pro-consumer organization that is assisting Pavlovich. “Justice O'Connor correctly saw that there was no need for emergency relief to keep DeCSS a secret. It doesn’t pass the giggle test.”<br /><br />A group of motion picture studios and consumer electronics makers filed the lawsuit in 1999 against scores of people, including Pavlovich, who posted DeCSS on the Internet. The suit alleged violations of California's trade secret laws, and a state judge granted an injunction against further posts of DeCSS by the defendants. However, the California Supreme Court ruled last November that Pavlovich was a resident of Texas with no real contact to California so he could not be sued in that state.<br /><br />Justice O’Connor’s ruling removed all restrictions that had been placed against Pavolich by the earlier injunction. He was a college student in Indiana at the time he posted the software to his Web site.<br /><br />For more information visit www.supremecourtus.gov.