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Movie Mogul Horror

http://www.lawnewsnetwork.com/stories/A19120-2000Mar20.html

Mogul Movie Horror

Can law halt Web cracking of DVD code?

By Thomas Scheffey The Connecticut Law Tribune March 21, 2000

Eight of the nation's major movie studios, battling the spread of a computer program which removes DVD copy-protection, have the creator of a Norwalk, Conn. computer hacking Web site in their crosshairs.

Paramount, Disney, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Tri-Star and Time-Warner are joining in a concerted Hartford, Conn. federal court action, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Jeraimee Hughes, to keep the Web site designer from offering downloads of a recently-discovered "key" to the movies' encryption.

DVD technology has grown to a million-per-week sale of more than 4,000 movie titles. It could be the successor technology to the popular VHS tapes that are currently the bulk of the home movie market. Unlike magnetic VHS tapes, copies of digital variable discs can be as crisp and clear as the originals -- which makes the threat of widespread piracy all the more serious, in the movie industry's view.

The quick-to-download free program that unscrambles DVD's protective Content Scramble System is known as deCSS. Its author, a 15-year-old Norwegian, Jon Johansen, said he and two Internet collaborators in Holland and Germany only wanted to be able to play DVD movies on their Linux-based computers. Johansen released it on the World Wide Web last summer. ...

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