• DeCSS
• Kelly v. Arriba Soft

DeCSS BACKGROUND AND TIMELINE

CSS, or Content Scrambling System, is DVD encryption. DeCSS is a program that breaks CSS. The DVD Copy Control Association, or DVD CCA sent notice to 93 people with the intent of notifying them of an attempt to place a temporary restraint order on them. (CSSCentral, DVD CCA). That was in December of 1999 and they went to court two days later.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF) put together a defense quickly for the defendants. The lawyers for the DVD CCA "[alleged] that Defendants have disclosed, and [continued] knowingly and willfully to disclose, proprietary information on their Internet web sites as part of a scheme to defeat DVD encryption software which thus enables users to illegally pirate copies of DVD video" (DVD CCA vs. DeCSS, 1). In doing so, they were alleged to have violated Trade Secret laws.

The EFF's position on the attempt to obtain a temporary restraining order (TRO) was that DVD CCA was attempting to infringe on the defendants' first amendment rights by attempting to censor information that was legally obtained, and that was not trade secret. The assertion that the information used to produce DeCSS was legal comes from copyright law assuring that reverse engineering is legal

The root of the case is their allegation that the original reverse-engineering of the DVD CSS system was "improper" (paragraph 18), "unauthorized" (para. 20), "wrongfully appropriating proprietary trade secrets" (para. 21), "unauthorized use of proprietary CSS information, which was illegally "hacked" (para. 22).

(EFFector, para. 6)

The TRO was denied on this day, and a new court date was set for January 14, 2000.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed another lawsuit of their own on January 17, alleging that the software violated the DMCA. On January 20, 2000, however, two preliminary injunctions were granted, one in the State of California and one in the State of New York. All legal issues have to be resolved before the injunction can be lifted to allow DeCSS to thrive (CSSCentral, DVD CCA).

[Defendants and] their officers, agents, servants, employees and attorneys and all persons in active concert or participation with them who receive actual notice of this order by personal service or otherwise be and they hereby are enjoined and restrained, pending the hearing and final determination of this action, from [posting DeCSS].

(MPAA vs Defendants, Injunction)

These court cases are still pending and one more lawsuits had been filed by the MPAA in Connecticut (Ultimate DeCSS).