DVD battle continues
Studios add court copyright ruling to arsenal
In November, a federal appeals court in New York upheld a lower court ruling that banned a Web site from posting DeCSS, a program that strips the encryption codes from DVDs so they may be copied.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trafficking in technologies designed to circumvent encryption systems is illegal.
But while the ruling may have vindicated the DMCA, the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used to encrypt DVDs remains vulnerable.
In the nearly two years it took for the case to reach the latest ruling, DeCSS remained widely available on the Internet and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
Even today, it remains available on some Web sites, including those originating overseas, beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
According to Bruce Turnbull, attorney for the DVD Copy Control Assn., which licenses CSS, "The vast majority of postings (now) come down after we contact the Internet service providers." But it's impossible to put all those existing DeCSS genies back in their bottles.
"Any time you're dealing with encryption, there's the risk that it will get hacked," said Warner Home Video exec VP of business affairs Marcia King. "But the court has given us the tool we need to protect our copyrights, and we feel confident that we have control over our product."
The studios also face an ongoing legal problem in California, where the state Court of Appeal has ruled that DeCSS is a form of speech and that banning it violates the First Amendment.
That ruling is being appealed by the DVD Copy Control Assn., but unless the studios win that one too, there's still a risk of DeCSS growing again on the Internet.
DeCSS has revived efforts to find a backup security system for DVDs based on watermarking technology. DVD Copy Control Assn. is conducting tests on various systems and expects to announce a standard by April 1.
The advantage of watermarking technology is that it survives hacking. Even if a watermarked DVD is copied, the watermark would be transferred to the copy and could instruct a DVD player not to play the unauthorized disc.
But it will take some time to put any new copy protection system into effect.
Once a standard is settled on, circuitry to recognize and obey the watermark instructions must be incorporated into DVD players -- it's likely to be well into 2003 before compatible DVD hardware is on the market in the U.S.
Any new system won't protect DVDs played on the 25 million or so players without the right circuitry already in U.S. homes.
In the end, DVDs' best protection could be the format's popularity.
Player sales are already growing faster than those for any other consumer electronics product in history and show no signs of slowing down, even in the soft economy.
Movies such as "Pearl Harbor," "Shrek" and "Dr. Suess' How the Grinch Stole Christmas" now routinely sell in the millions of legit copies on DVD, making piracy a relatively minor factor in the overall DVD business.
"The vast majority of consumers get their DVDs through the commercial market, and that isn't going to change," Turnbull said.
