Opinion ID: 775783
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: DeCSS

Text: 30 In September 1999, Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, collaborating with two unidentified individuals he met on the Internet, reverse-engineered a licensed DVD player designed to operate on the Microsoft operating system, and culled from it the player keys and other information necessary to decrypt CSS. The record suggests that Johansen was trying to develop a DVD player operable on Linux, an alternative operating system that did not support any licensed DVD players at that time. In order to accomplish this task, Johansen wrote a decryption program executable on Microsoft's operating system. 4 That program was called, appropriately enough, DeCSS. 31 If a user runs the DeCSS program (for example, by clicking on the DeCSS icon on a Microsoft operating system platform) with a DVD in the computer's disk drive, DeCSS will decrypt the DVD's CSS protection, allowing the user to copy the DVD's files and place the copy on the user's hard drive. The result is a very large computer file that can be played on a non-CSS-compliant player and copied, manipulated, and transferred just like any other computer file. 5 DeCSS comes complete with a fairly user-friendly interface that helps the user select from among the DVD's files and assign the decrypted file a location on the user's hard drive. The quality of the resulting decrypted movie is virtually identical to that of the encrypted movie on the DVD. Universal I, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 308, 313. And the file produced by DeCSS, while large, can be compressed to a manageable size by a compression software called DivX, available at no cost on the Internet. This compressed file can be copied onto a DVD, or transferred over the Internet (with some patience). 6 32 Johansen posted the executable object code, but not the source code, for DeCSS on his web site. The distinction between source code and object code is relevant to this case, so a brief explanation is warranted. A computer responds to electrical charges, the presence or absence of which is represented by strings of 1's and 0's. Strictly speaking, object code consists of those 1's and 0's. Trial Tr. at 759 (Testimony of Professor Edward Felton). While some people can read and program in object code, it would be inconvenient, inefficient and, for most people, probably impossible to do so. Universal I, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 306. Computer languages have been written to facilitate program writing and reading. A program in such a computer language--BASIC, C, and Java are examples--is said to be written in source code. Source code has the benefit of being much easier to read (by people) than object code, but as a general matter, it must be translated back to object code before it can be read by a computer. This task is usually performed by a program called a compiler. Since computer languages range in complexity, object code can be placed on one end of a spectrum, and different kinds of source code can be arrayed across the spectrum according to the ease with which they are read and understood by humans. See Trial Exhibits BBC (Declaration of David S. Touretzky), BBE (Touretzky Article: Source v. Object Code: A False Dichotomy). Within months of its appearance in executable form on Johansen's web site, DeCSS was widely available on the Internet, in both object code and various forms of source code. See Trial Exhibit CCN (Touretzky Article: Gallery of CSS Descramblers). 33 In November 1999, Corley wrote and placed on his web site, 2600.com, an article about the DeCSS phenomenon. His web site is an auxiliary to the print magazine, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which Corley has been publishing since 1984. 7 As the name suggests, the magazine is designed for hackers, as is the web site. While the magazine and the web site cover some issues of general interest to computer users--such as threats to online privacy--the focus of the publications is on the vulnerability of computer security systems, and more specifically, how to exploit that vulnerability in order to circumvent the security systems. Representative articles explain how to steal an Internet domain name and how to break into the computer systems at Federal Express. Universal I, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 308-09. 34 Corley's article about DeCSS detailed how CSS was cracked, and described the movie industry's efforts to shut down web sites posting DeCSS. It also explained that DeCSS could be used to copy DVDs. At the end of the article, the Defendants posted copies of the object and source code of DeCSS. In Corley's words, he added the code to the story because in a journalistic world,... [y]ou have to show your evidence... and particularly in the magazine that I work for, people want to see specifically what it is that we are referring to, including what evidence... we have that there is in fact technology that circumvents CSS. Trial Tr. at 823. Writing about DeCSS without including the DeCSS code would have been, to Corley, analogous to printing a story about a picture and not printing the picture. Id. at 825. Corley also added to the article links that he explained would take the reader to other web sites where DeCSS could be found. Id. at 791, 826, 827, 848. 35 2600.com was only one of hundreds of web sites that began posting DeCSS near the end of 1999. The movie industry tried to stem the tide by sending cease-and-desist letters to many of these sites. These efforts met with only partial success; a number of sites refused to remove DeCSS. In January 2000, the studios filed this lawsuit. 8