Calif. Reviews DVD Code Case
California’s top prosecutor on Thursday argued that an engineer had acted as a thief and not a free speech advocate when he published on the Internet computer code used to decrypt DVDs.
“The program we are talking about is a burglary tool,” Attorney General Bill Lockyer told the California Supreme Court, which is considering whether it was illegal to publish the decrypting program.
“It makes no sense for the law to create a safe harbor for hackers,” Lockyer told the court in San Francisco.
In a case recalling the intellectual property dispute involving the defunct music file-swap service Napster, the state’s top court is now considering whether a lower court acted correctly in barring Andrew Bunner from publishing the DVD decrypting code.
Bunner, a 26-year-old engineer who today works for a Silicon Valley software maker, four years ago posted the code, called DeCSS, online.
Bunner claims he was acting only to offer people using the Linux computer operating system a way to play their own DVDs. But his move unleashed a storm of controversy with the motion picture industry arguing that he was facilitating the theft of intellectual property.
