[IP] Supreme Court Intervenes In Battle Over DVD Piracy

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>


Supreme Court Intervenes In Battle Over DVD Piracy

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily intervened in a
fight over DVD copying, and the justices could eventually use the
case to decide how easy it will be for people to post software on the
Internet that helps others copy movies.

More broadly, the case -- against a Web master whose site offered a
program to break security codes for digital videodiscs -- could
resolve how people can be sued for what they put online.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor granted a stay last week to a group that
licenses DVD encryption software to the motion-picture industry,
giving the court time to collect more arguments. The group has spent
three years trying to stop illegal copying.

The DVD industry wants the Supreme Court to use its case to clarify
where lawsuits can be filed.

New York technology analyst Richard Doherty said companies have
delayed many new products, services and forms of entertainment
because of the DVD industry's problems. "The future of digital
delivery has been on hold ever since this case first came," said Mr.
Doherty. "They need to know it's going to be protected, it's not
going to be ripped off seven seconds after being put on the Internet."

In the California case, the state Supreme Court ruled in November
that the former Web master, Matthew Pavlovich, cannot be sued for
trade-secret infringement in California. Justices said he could be
sued in his home state of Texas, or in Indiana, where he was a
college student when codes that allowed people to copy DVDs were
posted on his Web site in 1999.

The program was written by a teenager in Norway and is just one of
many easily available programs that can break DVD security codes.

Mr. Pavlovich's attorney, Allonn Levy, said a group should not be
allowed to "drag a student who's involved with a Web site into a
forum that's halfway across the country." He said the case affects
all people who use the Internet and businesses with sites on the
Internet.

The California-based DVD Copy Control Association argued that
California was the proper venue because of the movie industry's
presence in that state. Lawyers for the association told the Supreme
Court that the stay was needed to keep Mr. Pavlovich from reposting
the decryption program on the Internet.

The issue of Internet jurisdiction has come up in Australia. Earlier
this month, in a landmark decision for defamation law, Australia's
High Court ruled that a Melbourne businessman can sue New York
publishing company Dow Jones & Co. in Australia over an article
published in the U.S. and distributed via the Internet. The article
was published in Barron's, a Dow Jones business and financial weekly.
Dow Jones also publishes The Wall Street Journal.

URL for this article:
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104128804514133793,00.html>

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