Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Web Site Offering DVD Copying Software.

Byline: Hiawatha Bray

Nov. 30--A federal appeals court has ruled that an Internet site can be barred from offering software that can be used to make illegal copies of DVD movies. The ruling is a major victory for the film industry and a big defeat for Internet civil libertarians, who say that the ruling amounts to censorship.

The case was spawned in 1999, when Norwegian computer hobbyist Jon Johansen wrote a program called DeCSS, which cracks the security encryption used on DVDs. Johansen created DeCSS as part of an effort to make DVDs playable on computers running the Linux operating system. But the software was soon being widely distributed on the Internet as a way of making illegal DVD copies.

The major Hollywood film studios, including Universal, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Columbia and MGM, launched an international campaign to force Internet providers and Web site owners to stop distributing DeCSS.

But the computer hacking magazine 2600 posted the software on its Web site, along with links to other locations on the Internet where DeCSS could be obtained.

The studios sued, demanding that 2600 not only stop offering the software, but also remove from its Web site any links to other sites that offered the program. The studio relied on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial federal law that makes it illegal to distribute software tools that can be used to defeat security features preventing illegal copying of software, music, and movies.

Lawyers for 2600 pointed to cases in which courts have held that computer software is a form of ...