San Francisco programmer An-drew Bunner was exercising free-speech rights when he posted on the Web a program that lets users copy digital video disks, a Cali-fornia appeals court ruled.
The Santa Clara County Appeals Court reversed a trial judge's order that forced him to remove the code, calling it a "prior restraint" of his speech. The injunction stemmed from a 1999 lawsuit a DVD trade group filed against Bunner for revealing computer code that lets users open and copy DVDs. The trade group argued Bunner had revealed trade secrets.
The group's "right to protect its economically valuable trade secret is not an interest that is `more fundamental' than the First Amendment right to freedom of speech," Justice Eugene Premo wrote for a three-judge panel.
The appeals court said the code Bunner posted on the Internet, called "DeCSS," is "pure" speech within the scope of the First Amendment because it's a written expression of the author's ideas and information about decryption of DVDs. Speech that's deemed commercial in nature gets less legal protection.
The DVD Copy Control Association, the sole licenser of a DVD encryption system, had argued that DeCSS shouldn't get free-speech protection because it's composed of source code and has a functional, potentially commercial, aspect.
A similar case is pending in the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York judges must decide whether to uphold a lower court ruling that barred a magazine publisher from posting DeCSS on his Web site and linking to other sites that have it.
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