WASHINGTON -- The movie studios win again.
On Thursday, a federal appeals court unceremoniously rejected the latest attempt by 2600 magazine to fight the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals said in a one-line ruling that it was not going to revisit an earlier decision in which 2600 was found to be unlawfully distributing a DVD-descrambling utility.
In January 2000, eight movie studios sued the legendary hacker quarterly for posting the DeCSS.exe utility, which decodes DVDs and allows them to be viewed on a Linux computer.
Any such utility, the studios successfully argued before U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, violated the DMCA -- which broadly prohibits anyone from distributing software designed to circumvent copy protection. Kaplan agreed. So did a three-judge panel from the Second Circuit, and now a majority of the entire appeals court has tacitly endorsed the earlier ruling.
That leaves 2600's editors, and their lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an uncomfortably tight spot. Their only option is to seek certiorari before the U.S. Supreme Court, but their odds of prevailing might be better if they wait until public opinion -- driven by copy-protected CDs, for instance -- is more on their side.
"We're disappointed that they didn't seek en banc review," says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "We'll make a decision shortly about seeking Supreme Court review."
Under Supreme Court rules, 2600 will have approximately 90 days to file a petition seeking a hearing. Most petitions for certiorari are denied.
This is hardly the first time that Hollywood and other DMCA proponents have won in court. A federal judge in New Jersey tossed out a case brought by Princeton University computer scientist Ed Felten, who claimed legal threats made by the recording industry unconstitutionally chilled his right to free speech.
On May 8, a federal judge in California denied Russian software maker Elcomsoft's request to dismiss a criminal prosecution brought under the DMCA.
