I am posting this because I see people giving David some hassle about taking down the link to the video.

In 2000, the MPAA (Movie Picture Association of America) sued Eric Corely aka Emanuel Goldstein, for posting links on his website www.2600.com.

DVD's have encryption on them known as CSS. Someone hacked it and wrote a program called DeCSS. When the code became available Goldstein posted it on his website. The MPAA had their lawyers have him remove the code. In response to this, his faithful readers posted the code and he in turn posted links to that code.

The MPAA wanted $2500 per incident of encryption being bypassed. How much that could have added up to I don't know but that kind of number adds up quick for a guy with an online magazine and a modestly selling quarterly.

The EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) stepped up and footed the legal fees for Goldstein.

While this case was about linking to code that allowed people to commit a crime, people could actually find useful and lawful ways to implement DeCSS. For example, you could use it to view DVD's on a Linux box instead of using software from Microsoft that could do the decryption. Goldstein was trying to take away the power of the MPAA to control how you viewed DVDs.

Regardless of why Goldstein did what he did (He was actually testing the limitations of the first ammendment) what really happened is summarized in this paragraph written by Goldstein after 2600 lost the case and was forced to take down all links to DeCSS:

But one very bad thing to come out of this is the order for us to remove all links to sites with the DeCSS code. By ordering us not to link, we're basically being told it's illegal to tell people where they can find the DeCSS utility. Search engines can, based on this ruling, be held liable if they link people to material deemed objectionable by a court. We find this to be a most frightening turn of events.

So for those who think David should have left the link up, the only thing he would have to gain is a large legal bill.

David was posting a link to a website distributing content they did not own. It would be much harder for him to try to use his first ammendment rights and it is unlikely EFF would step up and pay for a top rated defense team.

The details of this story are pages and pages and pages long and I recapped it. If you want to know more about it, check out the news archives for 1999 and 2000 on www.2600.com and look for stories related to MPAA and California CCA.