High Court Urged to Settle DVD Dispute

Thursday, January 2nd 2003, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Supreme Court has temporarily intervened in a fight over DVD copying, and the justices could eventually use the case to decide how easy it will be for people to post software on the Internet that helps others copy movies.

More broadly, the case _ against a webmaster whose site offered a program to break DVD security codes _ could resolve how people can be sued for what they put online.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor granted a stay last week to a group that licenses DVD encryption software to the motion picture industry, giving the court time to collect more arguments. She requested filings by later this week. The group has spent three years trying to stop illegal copying.

The case puts the court in the middle of a cyberspace legal boundary fight: Where can lawsuits involving the World Wide Web be filed?

Consumers' rights are pitted against industry copyright protection, with billions of dollars at stake, said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies Inc., a Silicon Valley consulting firm.

``All of us have felt this was going to be forced up the legal chain,'' he said.

The DVD industry wants the Supreme Court to use its case against a former webmaster to clarify where lawsuits can be filed.

New York technology analyst Richard Doherty said companies have delayed many new products, services and forms of entertainment because of the DVD industry's problems.

``The future of digital delivery has been on hold ever since this case first came,'' said Doherty, head of The Envisioneering Group. ``They need to know it's going to be protected, it's not going to be ripped off seven seconds after being put on the Internet.''

The issue of Internet jurisdiction has come up in Australia, where that country's highest court ruled recently that a businessman could sue for defamation over an article published in the United States and posted on the Internet.

The California Supreme Court ruled in November that the former webmaster, Matthew Pavlovich, cannot be sued for trade secret infringement in California. Justices 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.

The program was written by a teenager in Norway and is just one of many easily available programs that can break DVD security codes.

The ruling by a divided California court makes it harder for the industry to pursue people who use the Internet to share copyrighted material.

Pavlovich's attorney, Allonn Levy, said Monday that a group should not be allowed to ``drag a student who's involved with a Web site into a forum that's halfway across the country.'' He said the case affects all people who use the Internet and businesses with sites on the Internet.

The California-based DVD Copy Control Association argued that California was the proper venue because of the movie industry's presence in that state. Lawyers for the association told the Supreme Court that the stay was needed to keep Pavlovich from reposting the decryption program on the Internet.