Free Republic

Still trying to find something in English to properly confirm all the details about this, but apparently a French court has ruled that adding anti-copying mechanisms to a DVD violates the rights consumers have to make private copies of media that they’ve bought and paid for. Reportedly the court has given the company that released the film in question one month to provide the guy who sued them with an unprotected DVD; it’s not entirely clear whether this ruling applies to every DVD sold in France or just that one copy of Mulholland Drive this guy was trying to dub....

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Advisory DVD Descrambling Code Not a Trade Secret DVD CCA Surrenders in Bunner DVD Descrambling Case For Immediate Release: Thursday, January 22, 2004 San Jose, California - In a surprising retreat today, the consortium of entertainment and technology companies known as DVD CCA is seeking dismissal of a lawsuit against Andrew Bunner, a republisher of a computer program created to allow movie lovers to play their DVDs on computers running the Linux operating system. DVD CCA effectively gave up a multi-year effort to have the republication of the program, called DeCSS, declared a violation of trade...

<p>OSLO, Norway -- A Norwegian teenager has been cleared of DVD piracy charges in a landmark trial brought by major Hollywood studios.</p> <p>The Oslo court said Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," had not broken the law when he helped unlock a code and distribute a computer program enabling DVD films to be copied.</p>

OSLO, Norway (AP) — A Norwegian teenager who wrote software for breaking the copy protection on DVDs harmed movie studios by circulating it over the Internet and should have his computers taken away, prosecutors said Monday. Prosecutors also called for Jon Leech Johansen, 19, to pay $1,400 in court costs. But they stopped short of seeking jail time, recommending that the teen get a 90-day suspended sentence. A verdict is expected within a few weeks. Johansen has said his software, DeCSS, was necessary to watch movies he already owned on his Linux-based computer, for which DVD software had not yet...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project today asked the California Supreme Court to uphold a lower court's decision to permit publication of the source code for DeCSS technology, which circumvents digital copy protection systems. DeCSS is a computer program designed to defeat an encryption-based copy protection system known as the Content Scramble System, or CSS, which is employed to encrypt and protect the copyrighted motion pictures contained on DVDs. Today's brief is in response to a March 26 filing by the DVD Copy Control Association. On that date, the DVD CCA asked the California Supreme Court to...