Site Sells T-Shirts Imprinted with Parts of the Source Code for Descrambling DVDs

Can a snippet of source code from a DVD-descrambling program contravene copyright laws if it's printed on a T-shirt? That was a question posed during the final day of testimony last week in a high-profile lawsuit playing out in a New York federal court.

This week, the DVD industry made its answer clear by adding a company that sells such T-shirts to a long list of parties it aims to punish for promoting software that can crack encrypted movies on DVD.

The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) says Copyleft, a vendor of open-source software products and "geek wear" clothing, is among what could be hundreds of individuals and organizations who have revealed its trade secrets by helping to distribute DeCSS - freely available software that can decrypt the industry's Content Scrambling System.

DeCSS, written last fall by a trio of programmers led by Norwegian teen Jon Johansen, is at the center of two high-profile lawsuits launched by the motion picture industry in hopes of curbing unauthorized descrambling of copyright-protected DVDs.

In the New York case, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is arguing that DeCSS contravenes 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which attempts to make it illegal to circumvent copy-protection schemes. The MPAA's lawsuit targets hacker publication 2600 Magazine and its publisher, Eric Corley, for making copies of Johansen's DeCSS available on the magazine's Web site.

In Santa Clara, California, the DVD CCA has filed a lawsuit against some 20 individuals who rushed to help Internet users download DeCSS after Johansen became a target of the movie business late last year. The DVD CCA says DeCSS and its distribution contravenes the California Uniform Trade Secret Act by unveiling the guts of its CSS technology.

Steve Blood, founder of Copyleft, said his company doesn't sell DeCSS software that can be run on a computer. Instead, it sells two T-shirts with different modules of CSS-related source code printed on the back.

In addition, each T-shirt comes with a paper printout of the program's complete source code, but Blood told Newsbytes that he thinks the DVD CCA wasn't even aware of that fact when its lawyers finally added Copyleft to the California lawsuit.

"That is, in my mind, the biggest infraction that we have," he said. "However ... it's on paper, it's not machine readable. In that sense, it may as well be on the T-shirt."

The existence of the T-shirts wasn't widely known among those who aren't regular Copyleft shoppers until the clothing was proffered as an example of free speech by one of the final witnesses in the New York lawsuit.

David Touretzky, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, testified that it could be difficult to justify banning executable source code, which the judge in the New York case effectively did in a preliminary injunction against 2600 Magazine, when higher courts have already ruled that code printed on paper is protected by free speech.

The problem, Touretzky said, is that it would be nearly impossible to determine what constitutes offending code.

Touretzky's own Web pages at Carnegie Mellon sport a presentation he calls "Gallery of CSS Descramblers," with exhibits ranging from CSS-descrambling code that could easily be compiled to plain-English descriptions of the decryption algorithm. Somewhere between those two extremes is the Copyleft T-shirts.

Blood said he has no doubt that the mention of the T-shirts in the New York courtroom is the reason he is now embroiled in the California case.

Officially, Copyleft has been shoehorned into the DVD CCA lawsuit where before it listed "Doe (number) 74," filling one of some 500 slots originally left open in the lawsuit during an extended discovery phase that will allow the industry to keep adding defendants throughout the summer.

Robin Gross, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is helping to fight the lawsuits on both coasts, said that among the recently added "Doe" is Matthew Pavlovich, one of the highest-profile figures in ongoing development by the Linux community to create DVD-player software known as LiViD.

The DVD CCA says Pavlovich, a Texan, contributed to the revelation of CSS trade secrets by posting DeCSS on a LiViD-related Web site.

Also added to the lawsuit has been Johansen, who testified in the New York case that he originally created DeCSS in order pitch in on the Linux project. At the time, the court heard, there were no DVD players licensed by the DVD CCA that could run under Linux, though such software was available for users of Windows and the Apple Macintosh.

Gross said the motion picture and DVD industries say they're trying to crack down on people who are stealing their intellectual properties, but that the EFF believes the lawsuits have more to do with the maintaining a monopoly over the DVD-movie business.

Proponents of open-source DVD software point out that pirating DVD movies doesn't require breaking CSS encryption, since DVDs copied "as is" can be viewed with the help of any industry-authorized player.

However, in the New York case, the MPAA argued that movies decrypted with DeCSS can then be converted to digital-video formats more compact than DVD and thus easier to exchange via the Internet.

Gross said the EFF also maintains that DeCSS doesn't reveal the DVD CCA's trade secrets because it is original code created through the reverse engineering of other software, an approach she said courts have already determined is legal.

Blood said the DVD CCA's move to target his company may backfire on the industry, pointing out that Web-site traffic by visitors interested in the T-shirts has spiked since Copyleft was added to the lawsuit.

"It's been non-stop," he said. "In fact, it's the busiest we've ever been."

Blood said $4 from every $15 T-shirt is donated to the EFF to help cover its costs in fighting the lawsuits. So far, T-shirt sales have raised some $12,000 for the EFF, he said.

Gross said a trial date for the DVD CCA lawsuit in California won't even be determined until late this year. Meanwhile, lawyers for both sides in the New York case are supposed to file final briefs by Aug. 8. Judge Lewis Kaplan could issue a decision in that case soon after.

Copyleft can be found online at www.copyleft.net.

The DVD CCA is at www.dvdcca.org.

The EFF is at www.eff.org.

Reported by Newsbytes, www.newsbytes.com.