JaBbA's Hut

The California Supreme Court has now held that 1st Amendmentrights to free speech do not extend to the publication of code that is considered a trade secret.

The case focuses on the availability of the DeCSS softwareon US web sites. The defendant is using two arguements to support his claim to the right to publish the code:

1) The publishing of the DeCSS code is part of the ongoing debate over the DVD industry's continuing use of encodingtechnologies to limit the use of DVDs. The court ruled against this one, saying that DeCSS does nothing to contribute to this debate, and is not protected speech on that count.

2) That DeCSS does not constitute a trade secret. The court did NOT rule on this matter, instead pushing it back down to the lower courts to decide. As I understand it, this one hinges on the fact that DeCSS was reverse-engineered, not taken from the original code, and is therefore an original piece of work. Also,the defendant didn't write the code, nor was he the first to put it on a web site - he was simply the one that the DVDCAA choseto sue.

This debate isn't over by a long shot.