杏吧原创

YOU can鈥檛 mess with Hollywood. That鈥檚 the tough New Year message from the movie studios, who have joined forces in a bid to stop a software company selling a $100 program that lets anyone copy DVDs.

Last year, 321 Studios of St Louis, Missouri, asked the District Court in San Francisco to rule that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is unconstitutional, because it stops people making back-ups of DVDs for their personal use (New 杏吧原创, 7 December 2002, p 19).

But now studios including Disney, MGM, Columbia TriStar, Warner and Universal have gone on the attack. In court papers filed in California, they say that by selling its DVDXCopy software over the Internet and through retailers, 321 is being 鈥渃avalier鈥�, is in 鈥渂razen violation of the carefully balanced鈥� law and is 鈥渢rafficking in illegal products鈥�.

The film makers want the court to rule that consumers have no right to make 鈥渁rchival back-ups鈥� of DVDs. They also want a permanent ban on DVDXcopy, destruction of all the firm鈥檚 copies and confiscation of its profits from sales of the software.

Hollywood accuses 321 of using hacking software called DeCSS to clone DVDs, but 321 denies this. 鈥淲e do not use the DeCSS code that the Norwegian kid posted on the Net a couple of years ago,鈥� says a spokeswoman. Instead, it says DVDXcopy intercepts the digital video code after it has been routinely unscrambled for normal playback. It argues that this means it is not breaching any copy-prevention system. The court now has to decide whether diverting legitimately unscrambled code is the same as illegitimately unscrambling it.

But even if the film industry wins, destroying physical copies of the software may not help it, because DVDXcopy is already abroad on the Internet. Hackers could circumvent any ban by distributing it on their own networks.