Attorneys in video hacker court case predict mass piracy

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Conditions are ripe for a wave of mass video piracy on a par with that of the millions of computer users who freely copy and swap music via the Internet, attorneys for Hollywood's top film studios argued on Monday during the first day of a case seeking to stem the threat.

Attorneys for the studios are seeking to show that Eric Corley, publisher of 2600, a computer hacker magazine and Web site, has opened the floodgates to widespread video piracy by using the Web to spread tools to thwart video copy protection.

"We are trying to show that DeCSS can easily be used to descramble films and that they can be easily loaded on the Internet ... to trade for other unscrambled videos," said Charles Simms, attorney for the eight movie studio plaintiffs.

DeCSS stands for Decode Content Scrambling System (DeCSS). It is a free software utility created by a group of European teen-agers to sidestep industry-set copy protection software, allowing computer users to copy videos to any computer disk.

Millions of computer users have begun discovering the possibilities of using the Internet to share music, movies, software and other digital information, often without paying for the privilege, via MP3, Napster and other technologies.

Corley, who now goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein, after the hero of the George Orwell novel "1984," has been targeted by the studios for publicizing DeCSS on his Web site at http:/www.2600.org and offering links to hundreds of other Web sites that also make the software available to Internet users.

The Hollywood studios are seeking to use the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 to force Corley to cease providing Web links to what the plaintiffs have labeled as illegal software.

Lewis Kaplan, the judge in the case, granted a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs in January requiring Corley and two other defendants to remove the DeCSS software from their site. Corley's co-defendants agreed to comply and dropped out of the case. The trial is being held in Manhattan federal court.

The first witness called by the plaintiffs' attorney was Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-director of the Institute for eCommerce.

Shamos cited data he had collected off the Internet showing that 650, or more than 10 percent of all digital video disks (DVDs) now commercially available in the United States, are now available to computer-savvy consumers over the Web.

The videos are available in DiVX format, a new compression technology developed by an unidentified hacker that allows the billions of data bits necessary to store a feature-length movie to be compacted by a factor of five or more times.

It encodes with near perfect fidelity movies recorded in a state-of-the-art video encryption format known as MPEG-4, the professor told the court. MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group, a Hollywood media standards group.

By combining the decoding software DeCSS with DiVX, a two-hour movie that takes up 4.5 billion bits of storage can be compressed to around 750 million bits, or even smaller, making it easy to distribute video copies over the Internet, he said.

Shamos testified that shortly after DiVX was released to the Web in January, pirated DVDs started becoming available. By February, there were nine DVD videos in DiVX format, growing to a couple of hundred by March and a total of 650 currently.

"Trading (video) copies has started and it's going to rapidly accelerate because we don't have the protective devices" to prevent duplication and distribution over the Web, Leon Gold, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told reporters outside the courtroom following a break in Shamos' testimony.

Gold said Hollywood movie makers face the same threat as the music recording industry, which has gone to court to block the use of Napster Inc.'s service, which lets music fans swap songs for free by trading MP3 files over the Internet -- a trend that record labels complain is cutting into music sales.

"Now that they have got the keys to the kingdom, we can be Napsterized," said Gold, a partner with the New York law firm Proskauer Rose LLP, speaking on behalf of his clients, the studios and their trade group, the Motion Picture Association.

Corley and his defense lawyers maintain that the DeCSS software was designed for individual computer users to make copies of digital video disks (DVDs) for personal use, an action covered by "fair use" provisions in copyright law.

The movie studios argue there are no issues of free speech at stake, as the sole purpose of the DeCSS software is to circumvent copyright protection and gain unauthorized access to DVD movies. The plaintiffs' attorney said they plan to argue that the purpose of the 1998 copyright law was to prevent such code-breaking and simply needs to be enforced in this case.

Outside the federal court building where the trial was in progress, 40 protesters ranging from local Linux software programmers to teen-age hackers from Germany staged a vocal rally in support of Corley and the 2600 magazine.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Can you hack back?
June 1, 2000
Justice Dept. says new laws needed to track hackers
March 2, 2000
New DVD Audio copy system due
February 24, 2000
Meet the kid behind the DVD hack
January 31, 2000
Activist defends DVD hack
November 8, 1999
DVD encryption hacked
November 5, 1999

2600: The Hacker Quarterly

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.