US Supreme Court Will Hear DVD Copying Case

Court grants stay in Pavlovich case:

DVD copying has come to the attention of the nation’s highest court as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has agreed to put on hold a California Supreme Court decision restricting the entertainment industry’s ability to sue people posting programs that crack encryption codes embedded in the discs.

O’Connor last week agreed to the California-based DVD Copy Control Assn.’s request for the stay, giving the court time to collect more arguments. She requested filings by later this week.

The group, which licenses DVD encryption software to the motion picture industry, has spent three years trying to stop illegal copying. Lawyers for the association told the Supreme Court that the stay was needed to keep former webmaster Matthew Pavlovich from reposting a decryption program on the Internet.

In November, the California Supreme Court ruled that Pavlovich cannot be sued for trade secret infringement in California. Justices there said he could be sued in his home state of Texas or in Indiana, where he was a college student when codes that allowed people to copy DVDs were posted on his Web site in 1999. [Hollywood Reporter]

More on the case here.

Transcript of the decision here.