A panel of appellate judges will decide whether to uphold a lower-court ruling preventing online hacker magazine 2600 from linking to code that theoretically could be used to crack DVD security. But legal experts say the case could have wide-ranging ramifications for linking, publishing and copyright on the Internet.
"The courts have to craft a ruling that tells people when they may or may not publish certain content," said UCLA law professor and computer scientist Eugene Volokh.
The case also is the first major test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), an entertainment industry-backed law designed to extend copyright protections into the Digital Age.
The legal dispute began in January 2000, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sued 2600 and several other Web sites for publishing and linking to DeCSS code, claiming that it violated their copyrights. DeCSS was originally designed to let programmers create a DVD player for Linux machines--technology that did not exist at the time--but the movie industry argued that it eventually could be used to copy DVDs.
Other sites named in the suit caved and removed the code, leaving 2600 and its publisher as the only defendants in the case. After a lively trial featuring teen hackers, computer scientists and record executives, New York Federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan sided with the MPAA, ruling that 2600 could neither post nor link to the code.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing 2600, appealed the ruling in January 2001, calling it a blow to the First Amendment.
