- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday July 19 2000 15.06 BST
- The Guardian, Wednesday July 19 2000
Hollywood joined the music industry in the battle against digital downloads this week, with a legal battle against a website operator for alleged copyright infringement.
The Motion Picture Association of America, an industry trade group, has filed a lawsuit against Eric Corley, the publisher of 2600, a quarterly hackers' magazine and website, in a move that is being eagerly watched by online businesses, lawyers and computer users in the US.
Mr Corley's website has distributed software that unscrambles the encryption on DVDs, thereby allowing computer users to download movies on to high-quality discs and send films across the internet. In addition, it provides links to other websites which contain the same information.
At issue in the case, which came to court on Monday, is a 1998 law on copyright in the US which has already pitched the music industry against listeners citing the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects the right to free speech.
Leon Gold, a leading lawyer for the film studios, told the court: "The threat of world copying is here and the process has begun. It will become an avalanche unless this court acts."
Martin Garbus, the First Amendment lawyer who has represented the author Salman Rushdie, is acting for Mr Corley, who calls himself Emmanuel Goldstein, in a reference to George Orwell's novel 1984.
Mr Garbus argued in court that the technology at the heart of the case is covered by the "fair use" freedoms awarded by the First Amendment. Such arguments are also being put forward to defend online music downloads under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The unscrambling software is thought to have been downloaded from a website owned by Microsoft, the world's biggest software group, by a Norwegian teenager.
It has been largely used to allow people who already own DVDs to watch their movies on computers using Linux, the freely available alternative to Microsoft Windows.
The eight major film studios originally filed a suit against three defendants in January. Following an earlier order by the judge presiding over the case, two of the defendants settled. At the time, Mr Corley agreed to take the DeCSS software which breaks the encryption code off his site, but then continued to provide more than 400 links to sites where the code could be found, citing journalistic freedom of speech.
Mr Corley is a self-confessed hacker and his website is devoted to fighting against what it calls "the failing of our modern technical era... and corporate abuse of power".
The film industry argues that the links on the website blatantly evade the spirit of the prior injunction. It also says that the Copyright Act's language, prohibiting the provision of or "trafficking" in a circumvention device, includes linking.
US district court judge Lewis Kaplan could rule on the case as early as next week.
