[Rumori] court rules DeCSS no longer a trade secret

Sat Feb 28 16:44:18 PST 2004

http://news.com.com/2100-1026-5166887.html

Court: DeCSS ban violated free speech
Last modified: February 27, 2004, 4:35 PM PST
By Evan Hansen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

A California appeals court on Friday reversed a 4-year-old order
barring the publication of a DVD-cracking tool on the Internet, finding
the injunction violated the defendant's free speech rights.

The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection companies
can expect in California for trade secrets that become widely
distributed online.

The plaintiff, the DVD Copy Control Association, had argued that Andrew
Bunner violated its intellectual property rights by posting on the
Internet code known as DeCSS that can be used to bypass Hollywood's
encryption scheme for DVDs. Bunner's attorneys had countered that the
code was no longer a secret by the time he posted it on his Web site.

On Friday, California's Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed,
reversing a trial judge's order first issued in 1999.

"The preliminary injunction...burdens more speech than necessary to
protect DVD CCA's property interest and was an unlawful prior restraint
upon Bunner's right to free speech," the three-judge panel wrote in its
decision.

The decision ends the last strand of Hollywood's legal attack on DeCSS
in the United States, an effort that began when Norwegian programmer
Jon Johansen posted DeCSS on the Internet. A criminal case against
Johansen in his home country was thrown out late last year.

The ruling does not make it legal in California to post DeCSS
online--an action that has been found illegal by a federal appeals
court. But the case does mark a rare victory for free speech advocates
in the United States facing off with Hollywood over encryption
technology that hampers DVD copying and prevents discs from playing on
unauthorized machines.

The motion picture industry won a key decision last week against
DVD-copying software maker 321 Studios, with a federal judge in San
Jose, Calif., ordering the company to pull its products from stores.
That decision came two years after a federal appeals court in New York
found that DeCSS violated U.S. copyright law and upheld a lower court
order prohibiting publisher 2600 from linking to the code from its Web
site.

Those cases applied a federal law known as the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to circumvent
copy-protection schemes or traffic in circumvention tools.

By contrast, the Bunner case dealt with California state trade secrets
law, addressing technical arguments over what practices constitute
trade-secret violations and what steps companies must take to preserve
their claims to secrecy after proprietary information is made public.

Bunner attorney Allon Levy of Hopkins & Carley in San Jose, Calif.,
said the decision establishes important protections for software
programmers who use legal methods to learn about proprietary products.
According to Levy, programmers had gleaned information used to create
DeCSS using widely accepted software engineering techniques known as
reverse engineering. Had the DVD CCA prevailed in the case, he said,
programmers would have faced new uncertainties over trade-secret claims
asserted against legitimately created products.

"The court found that reverse engineering is presumptively legal,
something the plaintiff had fought tooth and nail against," he said.

The DVD CCA has long argued that posting DeCSS online is illegal under
federal and California state law. But, in a surprise move earlier this
year, the group asked the court to dismiss the case.

"The DVD CCA is disappointed by and disagrees with today's decision by
the California Court of Appeals," the group said in a statement. "We
are reviewing the ruling in its entirety to determine our next steps in
this case." 

=====
"you can learn a lot from a raver." - drbmd, 02/06/04
http://www.animalswithinanimals.com
http://badtastesucks.com

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools