In fact, at least one company, Intervideo, says it will release a DVD player for Linux systems within a year. And DivX, an increasingly popular compression technology that shrinks video files by more than half, making piracy easier than ever before, could soon become widely available. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Jerome Rota, a creator of DivX, which uses MPEG-4 compression and a hacked version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player, expects to have a legitimate, improved version out within months. By that time, he may even have some competition. Jan Stevos, who helped develop a Mac version of DivX, says that his team of programmers plan to release their own open-source version called "3ivx" by Halloween.

In order to show that DeCSS is primarily used to illegally copy DVDs, not just watch them on Linux machines, attorneys for the movie studios used examples from both DeCSS and DivX, (which bears no relation to the failed Circuit City service), to argue that widespread video piracy is just around the corner.

To that end, they called Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Michael Ian Shamos, who testified at the DeCSS trial that DivX was easy to use and had the potential to make pirated movie trading as popular as MP3-swapping on Napster. Using a tutorial at the DivX-help site FM4.org, Shamos said it took about 20 hours to find and trade DVDs in the DivX format; in cross-examination, he added that some DVDs, including "Fight Club" and "The Jungle Book" don't translate to the DivX format.

Having tried DivX myself, and found it incredibly complicated and the video quality abysmal, it's hard to believe that DeCSS and DivX will cause movie studios to suddenly wake up one morning anytime soon, "finding out they've been Napsterized," as the studios' lawyer, Leon Gold, phrased it in his opening statement.

Still, few disagree that technological developments are already making the present case look outdated. "Before the decision comes out, you'll have a new technology that makes [DeCSS] obsolete," says Per Johansen, father of Jon, the Norwegian teenager who allegedly helped write part of DeCSS. Both Johansens have been charged with criminal unauthorized access in Norway (Per is implicated because Jon used his father's company's Web site to post the code), and came to New York for last weekend's H2K hacker convention and to rally public support for the DeCSS cause.

They cited the proliferation of the banned code -- on mirror sites all over the Web, not to mention on the T-shirts sported by hackers at the worldwide hackers' conference held last weekend at New York's Hotel Pennsylvania -- as proof that DeCSS and other technologies are unstoppable, regardless of how the courts rule. (Think Gnutella.)

"The toothpaste is out of the tube," says Jim Gleason, president of the New York Linux users group, and leader of the outdoor protest. "You can't stick it back in."

But the existence of new technology doesn't necessarily spell bad news for the movie industry, say DeCSS supporters like Jason Nodens, 21, a freelance computer engineer who attended H2K. "Look at what happened with video," he said, standing beside a "FUCK THE MPAA" billboard. "They thought it would kill them and now it brings in millions."

"I generally think the courts are pretty useless, but in the case, if the MPAA wins, some people will be too afraid to create new things that benefit society and that earn a profit," Nodens added.

Meanwhile, other DeCSS supporters feared lesser evils. Take Frank de Lange, a "hacker for hire" from the Netherlands who spent most of Monday outside the courthouse playing his guitar and singing an anti-MPAA song set to the Village People's "YMCA" melody. His concern lies with literature.

"Personally, I don't give a hoot about DVDs," he said. "I care about books, so what this case means to me is that if Microsoft puts out the next Stephen King book on its MS-Reader technology, and if I figure out a way to read it on my Linux computer, I'm breaking the law. It's not about the money -- I'd pay for the book -- it's about access."

To Goldstein, though, even access doesn't get to the heart of the matter. What he's fighting for is the right to publish code, regardless of its application. Not all of Goldstein's supporters would agree with this stance; indeed, Peter Bergson, a 32-year-old software engineer from Bristol, Conn., said he wished pirates would stop using DeCSS. But when I asked Goldstein if he felt frustrated that people could use the DeCSS DVD-player software for piracy and therefore hurt his chances of winning this case, his head shot up. He squinted and stared with what looked like confusion at Bergson's ignorance.

"You can use perfectly benign elements to create an atomic bomb," he said. "It doesn't mean any one of them should be outlawed."

The Free Software Project
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