Film Industry Wins Ruling in DVD Suit

The film industry won what it called a major courtroom victory Thursday in its effort to combat online piracy when a federal judge ordered a group of Web sites to stop distributing a program that can be used to make illegal copies of DVD movies.

The judge brushed aside arguments by civil liberties groups that the program was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, and ruled that the distribution of a program called De-CSS was a violation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The suit, though narrowly aimed at three Web sites, is an early skirmish in what many expect to be a decades-long battle by the movie industry to protect its central business model--controlling the distribution of content--from the anarchic forces of the Internet.

Online activists said such attempts by the film studios are doomed in the long run.

But Jack Valenti, chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, declared the ruling “a great victory for creative artists, consumers and copyright owners everywhere.” The MPAA combined with Disney, Paramount, Time Warner and four other major studios to file the suit last week.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York granted the companies’ request for a preliminary injunction requiring three New York defendants to remove the program from their Web sites immediately.

A range of activist groups have lashed out at the film industry for filing the suit, most notably the growing online community of users of the Linux operating system, who believe that content and code ought to be freely distributed online.

“This will have a chilling effect on free speech,” said Robin Gross, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the lawyers representing defendants. “Code is speech. To tell people they can’t give out information is a prior restraint.”

Many in the computer community regard the ruling as futile because the De-CSS program has already spread so swiftly online that the film industry will never be able to stamp it out.

“The problem comes from trying to apply an obsolete business model to a new medium.” said John Gilmore, co-founder of the foundation.

The defendants in the case include Eric Corley, who operates a magazine for computer hackers and the www.2600.com Web site; Roman Kazan, who operates www.krackdown.com; and Shawn C. Reimerdes, who operates www.dvd-copy.com.

The ruling comes as the industry is awaiting the outcome of a similar suit filed in Superior Court in Santa Clara, Calif., recently by DVD manufacturers and other companies. That suit accuses dozens of Web site operators of theft of trade secrets by distributing the De-CSS program.

The software, devised by a group of Norwegian programmers last fall, cracks the encryption system that studios and hardware companies adopted to protect DVD movies from piracy. DVDs are essentially compact discs but with far greater storage capacity, enough to store full-length movies.

DVDs have exploded in popularity over the past year and the industry estimates that 4,000 movies are now available on discs.

Hollywood was slow to embrace DVD technology because, unlike videotapes, DVDs store movies in a digital format that theoretically can be copied infinitely with no deterioration in quality. To meet studio concerns, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Toshiba Corp. developed the Content Scramble System--a way of encrypting a DVD so it can’t be copied.

That encryption scheme held up until November when programmers sought to devise a way to view DVD movies on computers running the Linux operating system. Computers running on Apple or Microsoft operating systems already can view DVDs. The program was posted on the Internet, where it has spread rapidly.

Movie studios fear they could find themselves in the same position as the music industry, which has seen piracy flourish on the Internet with the exploding popularity of MP3, a compression format that allows songs to be converted to a computer file and traded online.

For now, the sheer heft of movie files--most are about 5 gigabytes--inhibits widespread piracy.

The film industry has sought to shore up its software security with legal protections. Its suit stemmed from a law it lobbied for that makes it illegal to create or distribute a device or program that could be used to violate copyright laws.

Some legal experts doubt the constitutionality of the act and point to other cases in which software has been regarded by courts as a form of speech.

Even if the industry prevails on legal grounds, many believe it is engaged in a battle against technology that it cannot ultimately win.

Film industry attorneys say the ruling is important despite the wide availability of the program.

“What this shows is that what these people were doing is illegal,” said Mark Litvack, director of worldwide legal affairs for the Motion Picture Association of America. “I would hope most Americans will follow the law. Is crime still going to happen? Unfortunately, yes. But we will continue to protect our members.”