NEW YORK -- Is the movie industry being "Napsterised?" A university professor testified on Monday in New York Federal Court that DeCSS, a program that decrypts the protections on digital video disks will quickly lead to rampant copying of movies -- just as music is being copied and traded over Napster .
"It is clear what is going on in the music industry is that music files are being compressed and traded," said Dr. Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science and the director of the Univeral Library project at Carnegie Mellon University. "It is completely clear to me that the same is being done with video that is happening to music."
Shamos' testimony is the first step towards proving that DeCSS is a tool whose primary purpose, according to the eight major movie studios who are the plaintiffs in the case, is to allow the pirating of their movies.
The civil case has been filed by the members of the Motion Picture Associate of America in New York against three residents -- most notably Eric Corley, also known as "Emmanuel Goldstein," the publisher of 2600 magazine -- for contributory copyright infringement.
The defendants describe the trial as one that pits free speech and fair use versus the strong copyright and access-control protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1999.
'End of fair use?'
"We realise that artists and movie studios need to be reimbursed," said Martin Garbus, the lead attorney for the defendants in the case. "But does this new technology mean the end of fair use? The case is larger than (the MPAA) would have you believe."
The attorney for the movie industry called it a clash of cultures, between freewheeling hipsters of the Internet and the hard-working creative talents in the movie companies. "The plaintiffs have a right to protect their content,"said Leon Gold, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP and the lead attorney for the studios, in his opening remarks. "The hacker zealots are wrong."
Shamos related to Judge Lewis Kaplan -- an admitted technology neophyte -- how his assistant, under his supervision, used the DeCSS program to decrypt a DVD and then compress the resulting files to more than one-fifth their original size into a new format. That format is known as DivX among hackers and allows songs to be stored more easily on hard drives and makes them five times faster to download and upload on the Internet.
The link followed by Shamos and his assistant to obtain DeCSS appeared on the 2600 Web site.
All in all, the process took Shamos' assistant about 20 hours to decrypt the movie "Sleepless in Seattle" and compress it into the DivX format. Shamos claimed that with the expertise they have gained, they could cut that time to 10 hours.
Shamos' assistant then traded the movie on the Internet for a copy of the "Matrix" in the DivX format. Using the university network, which averaged 250kbps during the download and another 250kbps for the simultaneous upload, the trade took about 6 hours.
While -- for Shamos -- such a "short" download time indicated a danger to the movie industry, for a home user with a 56kbps modem, such a trade would easily take 60 hours. Home users with a digital subscriber line could cut that down to 15 hours.
When Judge Kaplan asked if he could do this at home, Shamos answered, "With a compliant player -- yes." To which the Judge answered, "I have no idea."
Anti-MPAA demonstrations
Outside, about 30 demonstrators stood behind the the New York courthouse's concrete barricades, chanting "MPAA! Don't take our rights away."
Jim Gleason, president of the New York Linux Users' Group had organised part of the demonstration. "There needs to be a dialog," he said. "This is similar to what is happening in the music industry," referring to the mass lawsuits filed against music copiers. "The industry is gaining copyright privileges that were never intended."
The defendants' attorney Garbus pointed out that the MPAA still does not have proof that DeCSS is being used for piracy. "It is easy to say the sky is falling," he said. "But what is happening with Napster is not happening here."
The trial is expected to take a week to two weeks to complete. The defendants have indicated that they believe they will have to appeal the judge's verdict.
