Hollywood Hunts DVD Traders
Hollywood is going to court to battle a digital future where movies are available for free on the Internet.
But unlike the music industry's current court battle against Napster, no one is trading movies for free online—not yet. Unlike songs, movies are currently too big to distribute on the Internet.
But hoping to head the hackers off at the pass, movie companies and industry associations have filed a battery of lawsuits against groups and individuals developing computer language that descrambles the code the industry uses to protect DVD movies.
The Motion Picture Association of America, an industry group called the DVD Copy Control Association and studios including Universal, Paramount (which is owned by the same company that owns CBS) and MGM are involved in suits.
The DVD Copy Control Association has even sued computer geek merchandiser Copyleft for selling T-shirts supporting the right to spread the code for the descrambling program called "DeCSS."
Copyleft founder Steve Blood says the court case against him and others spreading the computer code "is a pivotal case in terms of free speech."
But the MPAA explains its lawsuits by saying, "it is essential to maintain a climate of respect for the law and for the rights of others."
Professor Dave Touretzky has testified in one of the cases filed by the MPAA that computer code is free speech, protected in the same way as a diagram of the illegal drug LSD, or plans for a bomb.
And defendant Eric Corly, the editor of the hacker magazine 2600, testified in a deposition: "I feel strongly that we all have both the desire and the right to know how thing around us operate…It is a chilling effect if you start punishing people from showing how something works. It is one step away from punishing someone (for) talking about it."
The industry counters that the DeCSS code is a set of unscrambling instructions to a machine, as inexpressive as the numeric combination to the locks to a bank vault.
And Robert Sugarman, who filed the suit on behalf of the DVD Copy Control Association, tells The Washington Post, "Anybody who posts the DeCSS program on a Web site or puts it in a T-shirt knows it was illegally and improperly obtained."
"There is no First Amendment right to steal a trade secret," he adds.
Aram Sinnreigh, an analyst from Jupiter Communications, thinks the computer industry made a mistake pursuing this case. He says that once technology like DeCSS is released, it can't be stopped.
The only thing the suit accomplished, he says, is drawing attention to DeCSS.
Even so, Sinnreigh says bottlenecks in technology and consumer psychology give the fil industry some time to ward off the piracy problems that plague the music industry.
"At least for a five- to10-year window, the film industry has a lot less to fear from the Internet than the music industry thinks it has," says Sinnreigh.
Sinnreigh says the music industry would not have been plagued by piracy if it had offered people a convenient and inexpensive alternative to Napster, the music-trading Web site now locked in legal battle with the Recording Industry Association of America.
Sinnreigh says Hollywood is trying not to make the same mistake the music studios did.
Warning that every encryption strategy can be hacked, Sinnreigh says the movie industry must find instead convenient ways to deliver movies to the public at a fair price.
He says initiatives like Enron, a private network that Blockbuster will use to provide movies on demand to home users, shows the industry is on the right track.
However, the current lawsuits show that while Hollywood devises ways to court consumers, it is also willing to use the courts to defend its turf.
By CHRIS HAWKE