DeCSS
From the register:
“Hollywood has abandoned its attempt to stifle publication of DVD decryption code, by dropping its lawsuit against a Californian publisher. The DVD CCA (Copy Control Association) filed a trade secrets lawsuit against Andrew Bunner (and others) for disclosing details of the DeCSS, which circumvents the CSS encryption scheme used on DVD discs.” Read More…
In case you haven’t been following this: Somebody had to decode DeCSS, simply so that they could play their legal DVD’s in their legal dvd drive on their computer because it was the case that putting a perfectly legal DVD in a computer running linux meant that it would not play. Hollywood assumes we all use Windows or Mac, so there was no copy-protection translastion software for linux (Hollywood DVDs would not play on a Linux machine). So, as is standard procedure with Linux, an end-user wrote a program that allowed DVD’s to play on Linux machines. But in order to do that, he had to understand (or “crack”) the code and then shared his improvement. Such is the way of Linux. So they tried to throw the guy in jail.
But according to today’s news, they dropped the charges finally, after three years. Good.