Sullivan's argument, which contends that computer code like DeCSS should be entitled to the highest degree of First Amendment protection because it is a means of expressing ideas. The judges seemed less interested in another prong of Ms. Corley was intentionally trying to disseminate the code with the links on his site. Alter said, adding that he believed that Mr. ''They would have to be interested in facilitating the distribution of contraband,'' Mr. Corley from linking to other sites that distributed DeCSS, including whether an online newspaper under the same logic would be liable for a link to contraband or other illegal material. Alter about the rationale for preventing Mr. Corley's case was simply about the distribution of a decryption device. Without the 1998 copyright act, he said, Hollywood would have little motivation to distribute its movies in digital form.Īnd Daniel Alter, an assistant United States attorney who argued for the government, said the court need not even address the issue of fair use, because Mr. Sullivan countered that denying users the most technologically advanced means to make fair-use copies would be like leaving them behind in ''the horse-and-buggy era'' while copyright holders ''advance into the 21st century.''Ĭharles Sims of the New York law firm of Proskauer Rose, who argued for the studios, said that the law was necessary to prevent the ''Napsterization of the movie industry,'' referring to the music industry's dispute with Napster, the popular music-swapping service. (The DVD's work on the Windows operating system, but not on Linux.) The lower court issued an injunction against 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 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. 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 provision at issue specifically prohibits the dissemination of devices capable of breaking the technological wrappers intended to prevent the copying of digital material.Ī 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, from publishing or linking to DeCSS, a computer program that can crack the security system on DVD movies. 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 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. 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.
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