Universal City Studios

“ Where, as here, harm is done by dissemination of information over the Internet, probably by a substantial number of people all over the world, defendants’ proposed rule would foreclose judicial relief anywhere because joinder of all plainly would be impossible in any one place, and technology does not permit identification of which wrongdoer’s posting or product led to which pirated copy of a copyrighted work. ”

“ In an era in which the transmission of computer viruses—which, like DeCSS, are simply computer code and thus to some degree expressive—can disable systems upon which the nation depends and in which other computer code also is capable of inflicting other harm, society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances. ”

“ Just as computer code cannot be excluded from the area of First Amendment concern because it is abstract and, in many cases, arcane, the long history of First Amendment jurisprudence makes equally clear that the fact that words, symbols and even actions convey ideas and evoke emotions does not inevitably place them beyond the power of government. ”

“ In determining whether one is engaged in good faith encryption research, the Court is instructed to consider factors including whether the results of the putative encryption research are disseminated in a manner designed to advance the state of knowledge of encryption technology versus facilitation of copyright infringement, whether the person in question is engaged in legitimate study of or work in encryption, and whether the results of the research are communicated in a timely fashion to the copyright owner. ”

“ If you have never been inside a motion-picture studio, an interesting experience lies ahead of you. For what soon becomes an old story to any one working “on the lot,” is fascinating enough to any one who sees it for the first time.
At Universal City, California, just across a range of hills outside Hollywood, lies a motion-picture plant that covers acres and acres. ”

“ They “are the mainstay of the Internet and indispensable to its convenient access to the vast world of information.” [253] They often are used in ways that do a great deal to promote the free exchange of ideas and information that is a central value of our nation. Anything that would impose strict liability on a web site operator for the entire contents of any web site to which the operator linked therefore would raise grave constitutional concerns, as web site operators would be inhibited from linking for fear of exposure to liability. ”

“ Conduct has immediate effects on the environment. Computer code, on the other hand, no matter how functional, causes a computer to perform the intended operations only if someone uses the code to do so. Hence, one commentator, in a thoughtful article, has maintained that functionality is really “a proxy for effects or harm” and that its adoption as a determinant of the level of scrutiny slides over questions of causation that intervene between the dissemination of a computer program and any harm caused by its use. ”

“ Congress is not powerless to regulate content neutral regulations that incidentally affect expression, including the dissemination of the functional capabilities of computer code. A sufficiently important governmental interest in seeing to it that computers are not instructed to perform particular functions may justify incidental restrictions on the dissemination of the expressive elements of a program. ”

“ Here, dissemination itself carries very substantial risk of imminent harm because the mechanism is so unusual by which dissemination of means of circumventing access controls to copyrighted works threatens to produce virtually unstoppable infringement of copyright. In consequence, the causal link between the dissemination of circumvention computer programs and their improper use is more than sufficiently close to warrant selection of a level of constitutional scrutiny based on the programs’ functionality. ”

“ Depending upon the programming language, source code may contain many 1’s and 0’s and look lot like object code or may contain many instructions derived from spoken human language Programming languages the source code for which approaches object code are referred to as low level source code while those that are more similar to spoken language are referred to as high level source code. ”

“ Development and implementation of a new DVD copy protection system, however, is far more difficult and costly than reprogramming a combination lock and may carry with it the added problem of rendering the existing installed base of compliant DVD players obsolete. ”

“ Thus, to say that a particular form of expression is “protected” by the First Amendment means that the constitutionality of any regulation of it must be measured by reference to the First Amendment. In some circumstances, however, the phrase connotes also that the standard for measurement is the most exacting level available.
It cannot seriously be argued that any form of computer code may be regulated without reference to First Amendment doctrine. The path from idea to human language to source code to object code is a continuum. ”

“ But the assumption that the chain of causation is too attenuated to justify the use of functionality to determine the level of scrutiny, at least in this context, is not.
Society increasingly depends upon technological means of controlling access to digital files and systems, whether they are military computers, bank records, academic records, copyrighted works or something else entirely. ”

“ There are far too many who, given any opportunity, will bypass those security measures, some for the sheer joy of doing it, some for innocuous reasons, and others for more malevolent purposes. Given the virtually instantaneous and worldwide dissemination widely available via the Internet, the only rational assumption is that once a computer program capable of bypassing such an access control system is disseminated, it will be used. ”

“ First, the statute expressly provides that “a technological measure ‘effectively controls access to a work’ if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to a work.” ”

“ Were that the law, defendants confronted with the possibility of injunctive relief would be well advised to ensure that others engage in the same unlawful conduct in order to set up the argument that an injunction against the defendants would be futile because everyone else is doing the same thing.
Second, and closely related, is the fact that this Court is sorely “troubled by the notion that any Internet user ... can destroy valuable intellectual property rights by posting them over the Internet.” ”

“ If a technological means of access control is circumvented, it is, in common parlance, ineffective. Yet defendants’ construction, if adopted, would limit the application of the statute to access control measures that thwart circumvention, but withhold protection for those measures that can be circumvented. In other words, defendants would have the Court construe the statute to offer protection where none is needed but to withhold protection precisely where protection is essential. ”

“ All code is human readable. As source code is closer to human language than is object code, it tends to be comprehended more easily by humans than object code.
The Internet and the World Wide Web The Internet is “a global electronic network, consisting of smaller, interconnected networks, which allows millions of computers to exchange information over telephone wires, dedicated data cables, and wireless links. The Internet links PCs by means of servers, which run specialized operating systems and applications designed for servicing a network environment.” ”

“ Any impact on the dissemination of programmers’ ideas is purely incidental to the overriding concerns of promoting the distribution of copyrighted works in digital form while at the same time protecting those works from piracy and other violations of the exclusive rights of copyright holders. ”

“ There is no serious question that defendants’ posting of DeCSS violates the DMCA.
Defendants’ constitutional argument ultimately rests on two propositions—that computer code, regardless of its function, is “speech” entitled to maximum constitutional protection and that computer code therefore essentially is exempt from regulation by government. But their argument is baseless.
Computer code is expressive. To that extent, it is a matter of First Amendment concern. But computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement. ”

“ Copyright and, more broadly, intellectual property piracy are endemic, as Congress repeatedly has found. [230] The interest served by prohibiting means that facilitate such piracy—the protection of the monopoly granted to copyright owners by the Copyright Act—is of constitutional dimension. There is little room for doubting that broad dissemination of DeCSS threatens ultimately to injure or destroy plaintiffs’ ability to distribute their copyrighted products on DVDs and, for that matter, undermine their ability to sell their products to the home video market in other forms. ”

“ If the defendant itself threatens the plaintiff with irreparable harm, then equity will enjoin the defendant from carrying out the threat even if other threats abound and even if part of the pasture already is burned. ”

“ Where, as here, two or more persons take substantially identical wrongful actions, one and only one of which had to be the source of the plaintiffs’ injury, and it is equally likely that one inflicted the injury as the other, the burden of proof on causation shifts to the defendants, each of which is liable absent proof that its action did not cause the injury. ”