Petteri Pyyny
29 Nov 2001 0:17
Yesterday The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that posting DeCSS code on the web is not protected by U.S. Constitution's First Amendment and that posting or linking to a site that contains DeCSS (or similiar tools that allow decrypting DVD-Videos' CSS encryption scheme) is illegal under DMCA law.
The appeals court said online publishing of DeCSS and linking to sites that publish it are not protected by free speech provisions of the First Amendment because the underlying software for those actions is "content-neutral" and serves a function.
Case was filed in 1999 by major movie studios against website 2600.com who posted DeCSS on its site and after movie studios demanded the site to take the tool off from the site, 2600.com offered links to other websites that contained the program.