Having whipped the DVD hackers in federal court, the studios now hold a strong legal hand in combating digital piracy. But protecting DVDs against illicit copying is likely to remain a challenge.
In November, a federal appeals court in New York upheld a lower court ruling that banned a Web site from posting DeCSS, a program that strips the encryption codes from DVDs so they may be copied.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trafficking in technologies designed to circumvent encryption systems is illegal.
But while the ruling may have vindicated the DMCA, the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used to encrypt DVDs remains vulnerable.
In the nearly two years it took for the case to reach the latest ruling, DeCSS remained widely available on the Internet and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
Even today, it remains available on some Web sites, including those originating overseas, beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
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