SAN FRANCISCO -- Chalk up a legal victory up for the computer geeks.
A California appeals court ruled Thursday that using the Internet to publish software code used for decrypting and copying DVD movies is protected by the First Amendment as an expression free speech.
The California Court of Appeals, 6th Appellate District in San Jose found that Andrew Bunner's published Web site links to software program called DeCSS represented "pure speech" and was protected by the First Amendment.
Thursday's ruling by a three-judge panel overturns a lower court injunction that prevented the program from being published by the defendants, though it is still widely available on various Internet Web sites.
"Regardless of who authored the program, DeCSS is a written expression of the author's ideas and information about the decryption of DVDs without CSS," the judges wrote.
CSS stands for "content scramble system," the method used to protect movies on DVDs against unauthorized duplication. DeCSS stands for decrypted CSS, a way of circumventing that protection.
DeCSS allows users to unlock the security code on DVDs and copy the movies to personal computers.
Bunner and several others were sued in December of 1999 by the DVD Copy Control Association, a trade association of businesses in the movie industry.
Bunner and the other defendants maintained DeCSS was merely created to allow DVDs to be viewable on computers running the Linux operating system for which there were no legal DVD decoder progams.
The DVDCCA eventually conceded that "computer code is speech," but said it would likely win at trial.
A preliminary injunction was issued in January of 2000 and the defendants were instructed to remove links to the program from their Web sites.
One of the movie industry's fears was that once the video files could be extracted from DVDs, they could be pirated like MP3 music files over programs like Napster. The large size of the video files made that impractical at first, but now several programs are available that compress those large video files to one-tenth their original size.
Entire movies can now be downloaded over file-sharing networks and burned to writeable CDs thanks to DeCSS.
The court acknowledged that DeCSS contains the trade secret algorithms to decode DVDs, but still ruled against the industry, saying the code did not fall into any of the established free speech exceptions such as being lewd or libelous.
"Although the social value of DeCSS may be questionable, it is nonetheless pure speech," the court wrote.
The DVDCCA said it would appeal the decision.
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