CA. Supreme Court comes out in favour of Bunner

"The DVD CCA [for which read Hollywood] has failed to establish that the information Bunner republished was still secret at the time he republished it on his Web site," says the California Supreme Court in its decision on the DVD Copy Control Association versus Andrew Bunner case.

DeCSS (Content Scramble System) is a computer code able to break the encryption security on DVDs. It was developed by Norway's Jon Johansen in the late 1990s and Bunner (and hundreds of others) published the details online.

This threw the major studios into a blind panic and they turned their DVD Copy Control Association (DVDCCA) onto Bunner. The DVDCCA managed to get a court order forcing Bunner to drop DeCSS and by default, the other DeCSS 'publishers' had to do the same.

An appeals court overturned the injunction in 2000, and Hollywood took it all the way to the top.

However, "Today we resolve an apparent conflict between California’s trade secret law (Civ. Code, § 3426 et seq.) and the free speech clauses of the United States and California Constitutions," says the Supreme Court of California here.

"In sum, the DVD CCA has failed to establish that the information Bunner republished was still secret at the time he republished it on his Web site."

They needn't have bothered, though. In 1999 the CSS source code was broken down to reveal the descrambling algorithm, and published widely online.

Then DVD-CCA president John Hoy Revealed All in the lawsuit against Andrew McLaughlin, Andrew Bunner, John Kew, et al.

In an amazing coincidence, before joining the DVD-CCA, Hoy worked for Toshiba America as director of digital video disc marketing and director of strategic alliances. And by another amazing coincidence, Toshiba was one of the CSS developers.

'Small World,' as Kurt Vonnegut Jnr would say.