DeCSS and the DMCA
By Lincoln D. Stein
I'm beginning to find the Digital Millennium Copyright Act very threatening. It was designed to protect copyright holders' rights in an age where digital information is extraordinarily fluid, but the result has been a legally sanctioned pogrom against Web sites by the Thought Police.
I'm referring to the August 17 ruling in which the Motional Picture Association of America (MPAA) won a permanent injunction against 2600, the "Hacker Quarterly" (see the box titled "Online Resources"). Sites like 2600.org are now permanently enjoined from offering DeCSS, a program that descrambles media files on digital versatile disks (DVDs). More chillingly, the sites are enjoined from even linking to other sites that offer the software.
A related case, brought by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), has won a preliminary injunction against 72 individuals and Web sites that have posted DeCSS or provided links to sites that do so. Unlike the MPAA suit, the DVD CAA injunction appears also to apply to source code, pseudocode, and other nonexecutables. The MPAA has also launched a third case, currently in federal court in Connecticut, against an individual accused of making decss.exe available on his Web site.
A Tangled History
The DeCSS cases have long had tangled histories. DVDs, as you probably know, are souped-up CD-ROMs that hold an impressive 4.7GB of data, making it possible to store a digital version of a full-length movie on a single disc and play it back at television resolution.<>
