A US appeals court in New York will tomorrow hear a case concerning the legality of linking to and publishing on-line a piece of code, called DeCSS, that can be used to crack the anti-copying code of DVDs, known as CSS (Content Scrambling System).

A lower court has already ruled that Eric Corely, publisher of the hacker magazine 2600, breached the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 when his magazine posted the short piece of code on-line and linked to other web sites that also posted it. The case was brought by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), fearing that the code’s display would make illegal downloads of movies widely available on the internet.

DeCSS was written by a Norwegian teenager who claimed he had to break the security of DVDs to be able to watch movies on his PC because CSS security was not compatible with the Linux operating system which he used.

Corely and 2600, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have taken the case to the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals, arguing that freedom of speech justified it in posting and linking to the code. The district court, ruling against 2600, had said that code is not free speech; a previous case over the posting of encryption code on-line ruled that, depending on the circumstances, it can be.

Full details of the case and its history can be found at 2600.com.

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