The Judge's order demanded that three defendants appear the following Thursday morning to explain why, on short notice, without a trial and at the Judge's sole discretion, they should not be forced to remove source code for a computer program called DeCSS from their Websites. The MPAA claimed that DeCSS was a device primarily intended to circumvent schemes that control access to DVD movies. By posting or linking to the DeCSS source code, the defendants were accused of violating a provision of the new law that banned the distribution of such devices. Source code is a set of instructions and comments created by a computer programmer. When processed by the proper tools and combined with the right components, it can be used to create a computer program.
Source code serves another important function as well.
You can source code used this way at any bookstore's computer section. Books on almost any advanced software development topic will be littered with examples of source code written in some computer language. Three months before the judge signed that order, some young Norwegian programmers had posted DeCSS to the Internet. It generates an unencrypted version that can be saved to a hard drive so that the movie can be viewed. The Norwegians developed DeCSS after reverse-engineering a Microsoft Windows based DVD player.