2 Copyright Cases Decided in Favor of Entertainment Industry

The entertainment industry won two closely watched cases that pit owners of copyrighted works against the people who develop technologies that can be used to copy those works.

The entertainment industry won two closely watched cases yesterday that pit owners of copyrighted works against the people who develop technologies that can be used to copy those works.

Both cases involve challenges to a 1998 federal copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which strengthened the hand of artists and other copyright holders in order to curb piracy of music, film and other works. Critics of the law have said that it gave too much power to the industries at the expense of consumers and limited First Amendment rights of researchers.

In one case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled in favor of the Motion Picture Association of America in its lawsuit against Eric Corley and his hacking-oriented publication, 2600, over Mr. Corley's decision to publish a program that could be used to unlock the copyright protection system for DVD's. That decision affirmed an order of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court last year that prohibited publication of the software and even publishing online links to the software. Mr. Corley and his supporters said that the copyright act and the judge's injunction unconstitutionally restricted speech rights.

"I'm not chortling or anything," Jack Valenti, president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, said yesterday, "but I've been confident from the very start that copyright — which is in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution itself — is indispensable to the country."

Mr. Corley said that he disagreed with the appeals court's decision, and that he would discuss the next step with his lawyers. "We have to decide what the responsible thing to do is," he said. But he added, "I'm not inclined to stop fighting this thing."

In the other case, a Federal District Court judge in Trenton dismissed a lawsuit brought by an associate professor at Princeton, Edward W. Felten; the professor had argued that the Recording Industry Association of America threatened him with lawsuits in order to keep him from presenting his research into ways that a digital copyright protection system can be broken.

The recording industry later backed down from suing Professor Felten, and so Judge Garrett E. Brown concluded yesterday that there was nothing at issue in the case.

"We are happy that the court recognized what we have been saying all along: there is no dispute here," Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president for the recording industry group, said in a statement. "Professor Felten is free to publish his findings."

Mark Lemley, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has followed the case closely, said yesterday, "it's not a real victory" for the industry because the case was not decided on the question of what would happen if companies carried through their threats of lawsuits.

A lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a high-technology civil liberties group, called the two decisions "a double whammy."

Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the group, said "I think we're all going to be poorer for it," because the entertainment industries can use the law to squelch innovation. "Anyone who wants to develop a new tool for us, the next VCR or the next MP3 player, will not be able to develop or promote this product unless Hollywood says it's O.K.," she said.