SAN JOSE, California -- It may have been a holiday week and only a preliminary hearing, but you couldn't tell by the throng in one Silicon Valley courtroom Wednesday.
Around 30 engineers, consultants, Linux enthusiasts, open-source believers -- and at least one self-described troublemaker -- turned out to express solidarity with the hackers who are being sued by the DVD industry for distributing allegedly proprietary source code over the Web.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday against 72 hackers who are accused of deliberately distributing the code that unlocks the system for preventing the illegal copying of digital video discs. Web sites -- including some news sites -- that linked to the hack were also named in the suit.
Supporters gathered outside the Santa Clara County Courthouse in downtown San Jose early Wednesday, then filed into the gallery in Superior Court Judge William J. Elfving's courtroom. They came with less than 24 hours notice, saying they were there in the name of preserving the free distribution of what they maintain is perfectly legal information.
"These guys want to play movies," said Bruce Perens, a noted open-source proponent and engineer who helped organize the turnout. "They want to watch them like everyone else. They're not out to bootleg."
Some attendees did more than attend. Ryan Salsbury, an AT&T engineer, dragged along a bag of 60 floppy disks, each containing the code in question: the DeCSS utility that lets Linux computers play DVD discs.
Salsbury wanted to make the point others are already making on the Web, which is that free code is free code and cannot be stifled. Programmers participating on the Web claim that the number of sites now posting the code have surpassed the 10,000 mark.
The disks in the courtroom "could drive that point home," Salsbury said. "It doesn't matter. They can't remove all copies of the source."
Later, in court, one of Salsbury's disks, along with a hard-copy printout of the source code, was handed to Elfving by Jeffrey Kessler, an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association, which filed the suit. The judge agreed to Kessler's request to seal both as evidence. Salsbury had given Kessler one of the disks as they entered the court.
What made Wednesday's show of support impressive was its spontaneity. Most were responding to discussion threads at Slashdot, the popular gathering spot for programmers. Slashdot itself is named as a defendant in the suit.
Husband and wife Linux supporters Tony and Andreea Martin came up from southern California's Huntington Beach to support the cause.
Attorneys for both sides argued for and against a temporary restraining order that would force individuals and Web sites named in the suit to remove the code.
Legal counsel from the Electronic Frontier Foundation represented the defendants in the courtroom Wednesday. The organization sought to provide stop-gap legal defense to prevent the many individuals targeted in the suit from going unrepresented at the hearing.
The EFF said its interest in the case is to protect reverse engineering as part of First Amendment protected speech.
"It isn't about piracy," said EFF co-founder John Gilmore, who was also on hand. "What it's about is that the public has the right to reverse engineer proprietary technologies."
The judge was expected to rule by late afternoon Wednesday.
