Bummer: Ban on DVD-cracking code upheld (written by Evan Hansen for CNET News.com)

The decision for now upholds a controversial law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and prevents Web site 2600 and its publisher, Eric Corley, from posting links to computer code known as DeCSS–a program that allows DVD movies to be decoded and played on personal computers.

Joining a growing consensus among courts across the country, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York found that computer code is speech and therefore entitled to some First Amendment protections under the U.S. Constitution. But the court concluded that the material in this case is “content-neutral,” and therefore entitled to considerably less protection than “expressive” content such as poetry or a novel.

“Neither the DMCA nor the posting prohibition is concerned with whatever capacity DeCSS might have for conveying information to a human being, and that capacity…is what arguably creates a speech component of the decryption code,” the unanimous three-judge appellate panel wrote in a 72-page opinion that leaned heavily on the reasoning of a lower court.

The decision is a major win for copyright holders in general, but especially for the movie industry, which has been fighting to ban DeCSS from the Internet for about two years. Civil rights advocates have been closely watching the case, arguing that the DMCA is overbroad and that banning links to content online could wreak havoc with free expression on the Internet.

Corley, the last holdout in a case that originally targeted dozens of defendants, has won high-profile supporters concerned about the case’s speech implications, including the lower court’s limits on linking. In a flurry of legal filings earlier this year, groups ranging from the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to a coalition of hotshot programmers submitted amicus briefs siding with Corley and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is spearheading his defense.

While acknowledging the difficulties in placing limits on linking, the appeals court essentially agreed with the lower court’s reasoning “that the DMCA, as applied to the defendants’ linking, served substantial governmental interests and was unrelated to the suppression of free speech.”