DeCSS Is Speech... At Least In California

from the aha dept

So, it appears that while the rest of the world can't touch the DeCSS code, we in California are properly protected by our free speech rights to do whatever the hell we want with it (such as sing it, should we so chose). Of course, how this ends up playing out with the federal case which has already said in some ways it's illegal to even link to the code remains to be seen. It sounds as though the court in California actually looked at the legal issue at hand rather than getting persuaded by an idiotic movie industry that this case was something bigger. For those who don't follow such things, the DeCSS code lets people watch DVDs on Linux machines. Not such a big deal right? Well, the movie industry went into this whole big thing about how it reverse engineers their stuff, and is somehow illegal. Actually, just posting the code (not even doing anything with it) or linking to it is illegal in their book. It's a bit extreme, and hopefully the courts will actually realize how ridiculous their ideas are.