Hollywood Studios Win Court Ruling in DVD Copyright Case

Hollywood movie studios scored a victory Wednesday in their battle against digital video piracy when a New York appellate court ruled that a 1998 federal law to protect copyrighted material was constitutional.

New York’s 2nd U.S. District Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction that prohibited an online magazine from helping users find a code that unscrambled the encryption on DVDs.

“When the framers of the 1st Amendment prohibited Congress from making any law ‘abridging the freedom of speech,’ they were not thinking about computers, computer programs or the Internet,” Circuit Judge Jon O. Newman wrote for the three-judge panel.

The case began in December 1999 when the Motion Picture Assn. of America sued Eric Corley and his 2600 Enterprises after he distributed a code written by a Norwegian teenager that allowed users to digitally copy DVDs. (Corley also goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein after the hero in the George Orwell novel “1984.”)

Corley could not be reached for comment.

In the case, Corley argued that his online magazine, “2600: The Hacker Quarterly,” had done nothing wrong by publishing the code called DeCSS. His lawyers argued that computer code is a language protected by the 1st Amendment.

But the appellate court agreed with U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who last year ruled that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is intended to protect digitally recorded movies and songs, was a permissible encroachment on free speech protections.

Publishing the code, Lewis wrote, was akin to handing “the keys to the castle” to copyright pirates.