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List:       isn
Subject:    [ISN] Editor defends publishing movie-copying software online
From:       William Knowles <wk () C4I ! ORG>
Date:       2000-07-22 5:03:20
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http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,500230905-500334697-501911436-0,00.html

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (July 21, 2000 9:04 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) -
A man accused by the motion picture industry of trying to sabotage its
efforts to prevent DVDs from being copied on computers says he is
simply a journalist trying to provide a public service.

"I've never taken a computer course or anything like that," Eric
Corley told U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan during two days of
testimony that concluded Friday in a civil trial in Manhattan. "I
consider myself a journalist."

The judge, hearing the case without a jury, must decide whether the
eight major movie studios can stop Corley from making software
available online or posting links to it so that people can copy DVDs.

Kaplan already has issued a temporary restraining order that forced
Corley to remove the software from his site, but links remain that
allow visitors to find the software elsewhere.

Corley, 40, testified that he did not know if the program worked but
felt an obligation to provide it to the public as the editor and
publisher of the Web site 2600.com and the print publication "2600:
The Hacker Quarterly."

"Honestly, if someone had given me 20 random numbers and said, `This
is the program,' we would have printed the 20 random numbers, if
that's what everybody was talking about," he said.

Corley said his magazine has published articles on how e-mail can be
spied upon and how cellular telephone calls can be intercepted. The
articles keep corporations and the government on their toes and help
to identify weaknesses in electronic security, he said.

"We don't have a big moral discussion about what is going to happen
with information we print because the information is already out
there," he said. "We like to think by printing this information, we
wake people up."

On Monday, movie studio attorney Leon P. Gold told the judge the
industry would never have issued movies on DVDs if it knew they would
wind up being copied on computers.

Gold likened what Corley was doing to Napster, a California company
that facilitates the trading of music files over the Internet.
Millions of people use Napster, which is being sued by the recording
industry, to exchange bootleg music in the MP3 digital form.

On cross examination, Corley conceded to Gold that he used his Web
site to encourage others to also publish the software that can
descramble the code meant to protect DVDs from being copied.

"Was it described as a free DVD decoder that allows people to copy
DVDs?" Gold asked.

"Yes," Corley answered, though he added that the software actually was
much more complicated than he had made it seem in his description of
it on the Web site.


*-------------------------------------------------*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
---------------------------------------------------
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