Another Blow Against Internet DVD Piracy

The film industry won its second courtroom victory against Internet piracy in two days Friday as a California court ordered dozens of Web sites to remove a program that can be used to make illegal copies of DVD movies.

Judge William J. Elfving in Superior Court in Santa Clara County granted the industry’s request for a preliminary injunction against the Web sites on the grounds that distributing the so-called De-CSS program amounts to a theft of trade secrets.

The ruling followed a similar decision in federal court in New York on Thursday in which a judge ruled that three New York-based Web sites posting the program were in violation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Online activists downplayed the impact of the rulings. They said the film industry is fighting a losing battle in trying to use the legal system to stamp out piracy on the Internet. They pointed out that the De-CSS program has already spread to thousands of Internet users.

Friday’s ruling affects 27 named defendants, including some who live overseas but operate Web sites registered in the United States. The suit also listed 72 “John Doe” defendants--all accused of distributing the controversial program on their Web sites.

“This establishes that the rules of intellectual property apply on the Internet, just like in all other areas of commerce,” said Jeffrey Kessler, lead attorney for the industry in the suit, adding that he does not believe the program will continue to spread online. “Most people are law-abiding.”

Even those who regard the film industry’s efforts as futile agreed that the two rulings represent a blow to online activists, particularly aficionados of the free Linux operating system, who have argued that the disputed code is a form of speech deserving 1st Amendment protection.

“Clearly, this is a wake-up call for those of us who are concerned about free speech on the Internet,” said Tom McGuire, a spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group whose attorneys have represented defendants in both cases.

“This isn’t about hacking and piracy,” McGuire said. “It’s about sharing legitimate information and code developed in the open-source community. The real threat is to the future development and growth of open systems.”

McGuire said his group will contest both rulings.

De-CSS, which was developed last fall by a Norwegian programmer, cracks the encryption scheme that studios and hardware manufacturers developed to protect DVD movies from being copied.

The programmer purportedly was seeking a way to play DVD movies on computers running Linux.

The program enables computer users to convert the contents of DVDs to computer files, which can then be distributed across the Net. The large size of such files inhibits widespread copying today, but many expect those technological barriers to fall as computers and Internet lines get faster.

Friday’s ruling stems from a suit brought in state court last month by the DVD Copy Control Assn., a group representing Toshiba Corp. and other manufacturers of DVD players. The suit accuses Web sites of theft of trade secrets.

Film studios and the Motion Picture Assn. of America have pursued a different legal strategy, filing suits in federal court accusing Web site operators who distribute De-CSS of violating copyright laws.