Those standing up for DeCSS have been hit again in their battle against litigation from the DVD and motion picture industries - a Santa Clara judge has handed down a preliminary injunction ordering DeCSS supporters to quit posting the code which breaks through DVD security software to their Internet sites.
Judge William J. Elfving handed down the injunction Jan. 21 against 21 defendants, on the heels of a federal court injunction against the practice. In that federal case, the order went against three hackers being sued for copyright violation by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The California case involves a lawsuit by the DVD Copy Control Association against 21 named and 72 unnamed hackers, says Wired, which adds that the preliminary injunction could set the tone for the lawsuit just as the federal injunction might in the MPAA suit.
The actual author of DeCSS isn't known, but the software was first made available by a teen hacker from Norway last October.
Wired says the defense in California was stunned by Elfving's ruling. They thought his earlier ruling denying a plaintiff's request to submit T-shirts bearing the DeCSS code into evidence was a good omen for their case, the magazine says.
"We felt fairly confident, and clearly we were disappointed with the ruling," Electronic Frontier Foundation spokesman Tom McGuire tells Wired. EFF represents defendants in the California case and the federal case. "But reading between the lines, what we see is a judge trying to act very specifically following the rule of law."
But McGuire also says the injunction means nothing to thousands showing the code on their Web sites, the magazine says. Elfving's decision indicated he was well enough aware of that side of the picture. "In granting this injunction this court is mindful of the many potential enforcement problems," he wrote in his ruling. "However, a possibility or even likelihood that an order may be disobeyed or not enforced in other jurisdictions is not a reason to deny the relief sought."
Reaction to Elfving's ruling was "creative disregard," Wired says, with hundreds of mirror sites showing DeCSS code springing up all around the Web. One group even went far enough to auction the code on eBay at $5 a throw, the magazine says.
Lead plaintiff attorney Jeffrey Kessler tells the magazine the Elfving ruling strengthens his clients' case. "Obviously, we're delighted with the ruling," he said. "I think this vindicates what we've been saying all along, that this is a narrow case about trade secret theft." The defense argues it's a question of free speech.
