OPEN SOURCE
Andrew Bunner has no idea how to decrypt a DVD. In fact, he's not even a hacker. So why is the San Francisco-based e-merchant - along with 20 other individuals and 500 John Does - a defendant in a trade secrets lawsuit being brought by the DVD Copy Control Association?
The short answer: Bunner, 22, used his personal Web site to mirror the source code for DeCSS, a Windows program that can decrypt the scramble system used in DVDs. DeCSS was first posted online in October 1999 by Jon Johansen, the 16-year-old Norwegian who's now a hacker cause célèbre after authorities raided his home in January. The intent of DeCSS, according to Linux advocates, is simply to reverse-engineer DVDs - a process protected by case law - in order to build a Linux DVD player.
In December, the DVD CCA filed suit in California against Bunner and the others, claiming that posting - and even linking to - DeCSS code reveals trade secrets and promotes DVD piracy. (A similar case is being pursued by the Motion Picture Association of America in New York.) As evidence, the plaintiff quoted comments from offending sites mocking the DVD CCA's lawyers as "trained weasels." The association won a preliminary injunction in January. Bunner has appealed, and expects a ruling by summer.
Despite the suit's claim, the code is hardly a secret: DeCSS circulated for months before the suit was filed - and still does. "As far as stopping people from having their own open source DVD player, that's a lost battle," says Bunner. Open source advocates say that the suit's real purpose is to intimidate makers of Linux DVD players. (More at www.opendvd.org.)
Lawyers for the plaintiff maintain that if the injunction holds, they'll use it to shut down any and all DeCSS sites. "I'm not going to tell you our methods," says DVD CCA counsel Jeffrey Kessler, "but we'll be out there looking."
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