DVD Group Drops Lawsuit

Saying it is pursuing other strategies to combat piracy, the group that licenses technology for encrypting DVDs on Thursday withdrew its lawsuit against a San Francisco man who posted software to crack DVDs on the Internet.

The move ended a four-year battle between Hollywood and Andrew Bunner over DeCSS, a program that decrypts DVDs protected by the industry-standard Content Scrambling System.

The DVD Copy Control Assn., which licenses the CSS technology to electronics manufacturers and movie studios, accused Bunner of violating trade secrets by posting DeCSS on the Internet.

The group withdrew the suit after winning an important ruling last year from the California Supreme Court, which held that a properly issued injunction to protect a trade secret did not violate 1st Amendment rights to free speech.

The case ended with one important question left unanswered: whether posting DeCSS online actually violated the association’s trade secrets. But the movie industry can use other tools besides trade-secret law to try to stop the distribution of DeCSS and other DVD-copying programs.

For example, a federal appeals court in New York ruled in 2001 that websites posting a copy of or links to DeCSS violated the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The major movie companies are currently using the law to try to stop 321 Studios, a software company based near St. Louis, from selling DVD-copying products.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that represented Bunner, said the code was never a trade secret and has been widely disseminated on the Internet.

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Bloomberg News was used in compiling this report.