Jari Ketola
4 Jul 2002 22:54
The hacker magazine 2600 will withdraw it's appeal to the Supreme Court since they see the chances of them winning the right to post the DeCSS code were rather slim. They see they have made their point and cannot take the case any farther.
2600 was sued by eight motion picture studios in December 1999 for publishing the source code of the DeCSS software and linking to other sites providing DeCSS downloads.
DeCSS is a tool developed by Norwegian Jon Johansen for viewing DVD movies with unofficial players. DeCSS has enabled computer users to view their DVD movies on alternative platforms, such as Linux, on which licensed, commercial DVD software is not available. On the other hand DeCSS also allowed users to decrypt and copy the content of DVD-Video discs on their computer hard drives for further processing.
DeCSS did not, actually, break the DVD encryption. Rather it relied on using a decryption key from a well known DVD-player software. The DVD license dictates that this key should always be encrypted. However in this case, it was not. The key has since been labeled "untrusted" and most DVD movies cannot be viewed with the old DeCSS.
More on the topic:
The Register
2600 announcement