I spent the morning hobnobbing with various agents of the press outside of courtroom 12D in the U.S. Federal Courthouse in New York City. The occasion: Universal City Studios, Inc. vs Reimerdes, or, as it is known by friends, MPAA vs. 2600.
The gist of this case, in a nutshell, is that someone reverse engineered the encryption for DVDs and posted a windows binary. Someone else turned that into some library routines that run on Linux. Someone else integrated that into a DVD driver (source code, of course) for Linux, so that open source geeks would be able to watch the DVDs they buy on their home computers just like everybody else.
When the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) noticed, they sent their lawyers out with threatening letters. After the first few threats, folks started mirroring the source. This was newsworthy enough to be covered by most of the press. It certainly was covered by all small geeky publications; one such publication was 2600. (Don't like being called geeky? So sue me!)
First round: preliminary injunction requiring them to remove the source. Now they simply have a list of sites that mirror the source. Sure are a lot of them...
Second round: the trial. The MPAA would like to prohibit sites from linking to sites that mirror the source. But, according to them, it's not a First Amendment issue.
And that brings us to today's trial highlight.
Attorney for the defense: Martin Garbus
Attorney for the Plaintiffs: William Hart
Witness for the Plaintiffs: Michael Shamos
Shamos, a CS professor at CMU who worked with an assistant to use DeCSS to decrypt a DVD, then compressed it, and finally traded it with someone over the Internet, was explaining how it was that an earlier version of an affidavit intended for fling with the court in this proceeding had listed the New York Times as one of the sites in the 2600 list of sites that had information about DeCSS, while the version eventually filed did not.
(The following excerpt is to the best of my recollection, since we do not have the transcript available yet and recording devices were not allowed in the courtroom.)
Garbus: Your original affidavit had references to the New York Times?Shamos: Yes.
Garbus: And the one that you filed with the court did not?
Shamos, No, it did not.
Garbus: And Mr. Hart asked you to remove those references?
Shamos: Yes, he did.
Garbus: Why?
Shamos: Because he didn't want, the New York Times is a newspaper and he didn't want to cloud up the case with First Amendment issues.
Well, there you have it: no First Amendment allowed here!
There was a small but lively demonstration outside of the courthouse today while the trial was in session. Some pictures are already available. One protester (Frank de Lange) brought a guitar -- what's a protest without some good songs? -- and wrote a little ditty which I reproduce here without his permission, but as soon as I find out which website it's going up on I'll provide a link instead.
(to the tune of 'YMCA')Yo man, there's a law you should know that was paid for by the guys who control what you see when you go to the movie theatre [ok, so that line doesn't scan so well..] No man, there's no way you can see what you pay for when you buy DVD if you won't wait for a player for your PC and you want to use free software MPAA We've got to fight against the MPAA otherwise we will lose our right to fair use it's a copyright law they abuse DMCA There's nothing right about the DMCA It's a menace to each, it's a definite breach, it threatens our right to free speech... (repeat until demo ends or you need a break.)
Okay, it probably sounded better in person.
We also had some posters of a portion of the controversial code. Declan McCullagh of Wired took this nice picture of one of the posters. You can't quite read the source though. Maybe I'll scan one of the T-shirts they were giving out, which has it printed in nice clear text on the back. One picture of the t-shirt is here, but it's a bit difficult to make out the text :)
Additionally, if you need a banner or sign about the MPAA to hang over your desk, here's one.
