Now that the motion picture industry has sued on its own to keep a DVD content de-scrambler off the Internet, such industry observers as Wired think the battle will get really interesting - especially as a preliminary hearing coincides with a DVD-related encryption conference near the site of the hearing.
The hearing was due to begin today. "There's going to be quite a caravan of folks walking over to the courthouse," says Alex Fowler of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to Wired. The magazine says that caravan could set the tone for the lawsuit filed last month by the DVD Copy Control Association against 72 hackers and Net authors who published information for the content-scrambling system on the Web.
Plaintiffs say the question is theft, period-dot-period, saying Web sites carrying the program or source codes instructions threaten DVD's economic viability, and the industries which provide hard and software to access digital images, Wired says.
EFF is furnishing legal counsel for the defendants, and tells the magazine the case has nothing to do with piracy or hacking but with censorship. "They are about censorship of speech critical to science, education, and innovation," said EFF executive director Tara Lemmey to Wired. "Reverse engineering of DVD security is legitimate and important for systems' interoperability, and a right that we must preserve for a healthy, open, and democratic society in the information age."
