Out-Law News 1 min. read
23 May 2002, 12:00 am
The appeals court had overturned a lower court injunction against publication of code that can be used to break the anti-copying protection of DVDs, based on the publisher's First Amendment rights.
DVD-CCA, the organisation that licenses DVD technology for Hollywood movie studios, originally filed the lawsuit in December 1999 and obtained a lower court injunction in January 2000 against defendant Andrew Bunner. He had published the software, known as DeCSS, that decrypts DVDs. When an appeals panel overruled the lower court injunction last November, DVD-CCA then appealed to the California Supreme Court to challenge the appeals court’s ruling.
The appeals court had ruled that the trial judge failed to consider the First Amendment rights of Bunner to republish information readily obtainable in the public domain when it issued the injunction.
DVD-CCA contends that republication of DeCSS software constitutes illegal misappropriation of a trade secret. Bunner had republished DeCSS on his web site after reading about it on Slashdot.org and deciding it was newsworthy.
"Well established trade secret law clearly holds that only those individuals who have undertaken an affirmative duty to treat information as a trade secret are required by law to keep it secret," said EFF Intellectual Property Attorney Robin Gross. "People who obtain information from the public domain have a First Amendment right to republish that information."
"We're confident the Supreme Court will recognise, as the Court of Appeal did, that this is a classic First Amendment case," said David Greene, Executive Director for the First Amendment Project and main author of the groups' legal brief.
DVD-CCA's reply brief is due on June 11, 2002, and oral argument will be scheduled before the California Supreme Court for sometime in the next eighteen months.