DVD Demystified

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be considered illegal circumvention under the DMCA and the WIPO
treaties.
There were rumors that the key used by the Xing player had been
revoked by removing it from the set of keys hidden on new discs, but the
rumors turned out to be false. Causing a legal player to stop working, even
though it had not properly protected the CSS secrets, would not have been
a good move, and by this time the entire set of 400 player keys had been
guessed at, so revoking one key would have done little good.
On December 27, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), the corporate
entity responsible for licensing CSS, sued 21 individuals and 72 Web
sites, along with hundreds of “Does”—as in John Doe—to be filled in later.
They were accused of posting or linking to DeCSS software as a misappropriated
trade secret—a rather shaky argument. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF) responded on behalf of the defendants with a shaky
argument of their own, tied to free speech. “It is EFF’s opinion that this lawsuit
is an attempt to architect law to favor a particular business model at
the expense of free expression. It is an affront to the First Amendment (and
UN human rights accords) because the information the programmers
posted is legal. EFF also objects to the DVD CCA’s attempt to blur the distinction
between posting material on one’s own Web site and merely linking
to it (i.e., providing directions to it) elsewhere.” On December 29, the California
court enjoined the posting of DeCSS, but denied the injunction
request against linking to DeCSS, as the court rightly feared the side effects
of banning the mere act of linking to information on the Internet, citing
such an order as “overbroad and extremely burdensome.”
Thus ended the year of DVD. Over 4 million new players had been sold
in the U.S., bringing the installed base to around 5.5 million. Player sales
had generated over $300 million. About 2.5 million players existed in European
homes, and the worldwide base of DVD PCs was estimated at somewhere
around 40 million. Fifty million discs shipped in the U.S. during the
Christmas season alone. Total U.S. interactive entertainment sales for the
year topped $7 billion.
The Medium of the New
Millennium
Chapter 2
The DeCSS saga continued. On January 14, 2000, the seven top U.S. movie
studios—Disney, MGM, Paramount, Sony (Columbia/TriStar), Time
Warner, Twentieth Century Fox, and Universal—backed by the MPAA, filed