The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and DeCSS

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Abstract: This paper discusses the ongoing court battle between the Motion Picture Association of America, supported by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and various defendants regarding the DeCSS program and its source code. DeCSS is a utility that allows the circumvention of the encryption built into most DVDs. Specifically, the paper examines the implications of the court decision on a range of issues including source code as free speech, HTML linking, and fair use.

In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Congress intended the bill to update US copyright laws to deal with digital media. They believed that digital media such as DVDs would be pirated in large numbers due to the fact that digital copies should appear exactly as the original. The solution was encryption and the DMCA was enacted to protect the copyright on digital media that is encrypted. A year later a program called DeCSS emerged, capable of decrypting the encryption of DVDs. The first challenge of the DMCA began, as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) brought suit against individuals who were trafficking the software on the Internet. The ongoing court case raised serious issue about the Internet and the digital age, including topics such as HTML linking, source code as protected free speech, and the consumer's right to fair use.

The DeCSS program was created by a group of three European programmers that called itself Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE). The media usually attributes its creation to a Norwegian teenager, Jon Johansen, although he has stated that he did not even do the crucial decryption portion [1]. DeCSS was created to provide a method of DVD playback under Linux, which at the time had no program capable of playing DVDs. In order to understand the basis for the case by the MPAA, it is necessary to first understand the encryption scheme employed by DVDs and how DeCSS circumvents this to facilitate playback.

Most DVDs employ a method of encryption called Content Scrambling System (CSS). With CSS, each encrypted DVD contains a key that is used along with a key in the player in order to decrypt the contents of the DVD. The DVD Copy Control Association (DVDCCA), the CSS license holder, issues the key in the DVD player to licensed manufacturers of DVD players [2]. DeCSS uses a valid but unlicensed key to decrypt the DVD content.

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