________________________________________________________________________________ /* see: http://www.nettime.org/~rolux/archive/00000434.txt */ Wired News DVD Lawyers Make Secret Public by Declan McCullagh 3:05 p.m. 26.Jan.2000 PST Lawyers representing the DVD industry got caught in an embarrassing gaffe when they filed a lawsuit and accidentally publicized the computer code they wanted to keep secret. The DVD Copy Control Association included its "trade secret" source code in court documents, but forgot to ask the judge to seal them from public scrutiny. Whoops. In a hastily arranged hearing Wednesday morning, DVD CCA lawyers asked Santa Clara Superior Court Judge William J. Elfving to correct their oversight, and he agreed to keep the document confidential. It may be a little late. The document is dated 13 January and is widely available on the Web. The owner of one site that placed the 140KB declaration online says over 21,000 people have downloaded it so far. The 11KB "CSSscramble" source code, part of the larger declaration of DVD CCA president John Hoy, cannot be readily compiled into a DVD viewer or copier. But if it had not been released online last October, the DVD encryption scheme likely would not have been penetrated. Elfving granted an injunction last Friday, ordering 21 defendants to stop posting DeCSS software -- which allows compressed video images to be copied from a DVD disc onto a hard drive -- on their Web sites. The blunder won't help the DVD CCA attorneys in their as-yet quixotic quest to rid the Net of DeCSS. The entertainment industry frets that such programs could eventually allow widespread piracy of movies. One California litigator who specializes in Internet and intellectual property cases says the boner won't derail the DVDCCA's lawsuit filed last month in state court. "The fact that these lawyers inadvertently filed with the court the source code and that made it a public document does not have a [substantial impact]," says Megan E. Gray, a lawyer in the Los Angeles office of Baker and Hostetler. Gray said the biggest effect might be to mute the rhetoric of DVD CCA lawyers. "It's difficult to say it's an outrage ... when you yourself have contributed to public disclosure. It undermines your credibility," Gray said. Making an already difficult task even more tricky for DVD CCA lawyers is that both the four-page CSSscramble source code and the DeCSS utility have been mirrored by dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of Internet users in a kind of global keep-away game. Activists outside a hearing even distributed copies of CSSscramble to people outside the courthouse, prompting a DVD CCA attorney to enter the document into official court records. Jeffrey Kessler, the plaintiff's lead attorney from Weil, Gotshal and Manges, told the judge at the time that CSSscramble was a trade secret and should be confidential. "I don't want to endanger their trade secret status by putting them in the public record," Kessler said, according to a transcript. He did not immediately return phone calls. One of his colleagues separately asked that a defense exhibit with CSSscramble be placed under seal. "DVD CCA requests the court place the [declaration] under seal to avoid placing this information in the public record," Jared Bobrow wrote in a six-page brief on 9 January. But both forgot about the DVD CCA president's exhibit -- that included CSSscramble -- until this week. "We still haven't waived our arguments that it has been entered into public domain and trade secret protection has been waived by the other side. We're going to pursue that," said Robin Gross, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing some of the defendants. "It threatens their case against the [DeCSS] utility. Their argument is that this information is highly protected trade secrets and they go through all the extremes to make sure the protection is in place," Gross said. "Our position is that they've waived trade secret protection from entering this into the public domain." Gross said EFF had not decided whether to appeal the preliminary injunction or ask for a trial. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,33922,00.html ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org