Universal v. Reimerdes
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Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000), aff'd, 273 F.3d 429 (2d Cir. 2001), was the first test of controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a United States federal law. The plaintiffs sought an injunction against the distribution of the program DeCSS which allowed circumvention of the encryption applied to DVDs.
In October 1999 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) became aware of the availability on the Internet of DeCSS, a program that could crack the copy-protection on DVDs. The industry responded by sending out a number of cease and desist letters to web site operators who posted the software, some of which removed it from their sites. In January 2000, the movie studios filed a lawsuit against Eric Corley, publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Magazine, and two others (including Shawn Reimerdes, who settled, but whose name is immortalized in the caption), based on the recently passed DMCA. After a hearing at which defendants presented no affidavits or evidentiary material, the Court granted a preliminary injunction barring defendants from posting DeCSS. At the conclusion of the hearing, plaintiffs sought also to enjoin defendants from linking to other sites that posted DeCSS, but the Court declined to entertain the application at that time in view of plaintiffs failure to raise the issue in their motion papers.
Following the issuance of the preliminary injunction, defendants removed DeCSS from the 2600.com web site. In what they termed an act of "electronic civil disobedience," however, they continued to support links to other web sites purporting to offer DeCSS for download, a list which had grown to nearly five hundred by July 2000. Indeed, they carried a banner saying Stop the MPAA and, in a reference to this lawsuit, proclaimed: We have to face the possibility that we could be forced into submission. For that reason it's especially important that as many of you as possible, all throughout the world, take a stand and mirror these files.
After a three day trial, United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued an 89-page ruling on August 17, 2000 upholding the motion picture industry's position and the constitutionality of the DMCA.
- In the final analysis, the dispute between these parties is simply put if not necessarily simply resolved. Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic gain. They contend that the advent of new technology should not alter this long established structure. Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located. Less radically, they have raised a legitimate concern about the possible impact on traditional fair use of access control measures in the digital era. Each side is entitled to its views. In our society, however, clashes of competing interests like this are resolved by Congress. For now, at least, Congress has resolved this clash in the DMCA and in plaintiffs' favor. Given the peculiar characteristics of computer programs for circumventing encryption and other access control measures, the DMCA as applied to posting and linking here does not contravene the First Amendment.
The court did not consider First Amendment issues relating to potential abuse of the DMCA's anti-dissemination provision to suppress academic research in cryptography. Nor did it consider that the primary threat to DVDs comes from the recording of early showings of movies using digital camcorders.
The case was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, attracting a large number of amicus curiae briefs on both sides. After a hearing on May 1, 2001 a three judge panel (Judges Newman, Cabranes and Thompson) upheld Judge Kaplan on November 28. In particular the Second Circuit ruled that linking on the Internet happened so fast that it could be restrained in ways that might not be constitutional for traditional media. The defendants chose not to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite the courts' rulings, DeCSS is still widely available on the Internet.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Trial: Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F.Supp.2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000). (PDF from MPAA)
- Appeal: Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429 (2d Cir. 2001). (HTML)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation DVD case archive
- http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
