Lawyers for Eric Corley, a hacker journalist and publisher who lost his appeal of a ruling that prohibits posting links to a program that disables the copyright protection placed on DVD movies (News, Dec. 3), have petitioned the Supreme Court to review the decision. The ruling is viewed by intellectual property owners as a victory for the future of secure digital distribution. A spokesperson for the Association of American Publishers told PW that the organization is "delighted" by the ruling.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan issued a unanimous decision in support of an earlier ruling banning Web access to DeCSS, a program that disables DVD copyright protection. The suit was filed by the Motion Picture Association of America under a controversial provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that bans software that removes digital copyright protection.
Martin Garbus of the firm Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein & Selz, Corley's lawyers, told PW he would bypass asking for a review of the ruling by a full panel of judges from the second circuit and directly petition the Supreme Court to review the decision. "The DMCA has never been challenged before and we need a national DMCA standard. It's also a high-visibility First Amendment suit. It will get attention, and the court likes attention," he said.
Allan Adler, v-p for legal and governmental affairs at the AAP, told PW that the appellate court ruling "is exactly what is needed to bring some sense of reality to the current discussion about the DMCA and to correct misunderstandings about fair use." The court's decision emphasized that fair use does not guarantee access to a digital copy of the material in question and said that viewers were free to copy DVD films by other means, such as a camcorder. Some critics have suggested that this consigns fair use to obsolete technologies. Adler dismissed those claims: "Fair use allows you to do certain things, without asking permission, to copyrighted material that has been lawfully acquired. It has never been an entitlement to a specific kind of copy."
