Forces in Hollywood are revoking your rights, and the Justice Department is with them. Specifically, I’m talking about an ongoing lawsuit between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a consortium of movie studios, and Eric Corley, publisher of the online hacker journal 2600.org. In the eye of the tornado is the source code to DeCSS. This program decodes the Content Scrambling System (CSS) woven into all consumer DVDs. This makes it possible to make a perfect copy of a DVD minus the encryption.Its creator Jon Johansen has claimed the intent of the program was part of an effort toward creating an open-source DVD player on Linux. None existed at the time.Whether you believe the code itself is an example of free speech or not, DeCSS’s creator is not the one being sued by the MPAA. The man in court is Eric Corley, and he’s being sued for including a hyperlink to the DeCSS source code in an article he published on 2600.org. Basically, the MPAA wants to take away an online publication’s ability to hyperlink source material to an article.The most troublesome part in this whole mess is that the Justice Department has sided with the MPAA. Thursday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals submitted a filing supporting the MPAA. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White said that “despite defendants’ efforts to pitch this case as a classic story of the gadfly press, and to cast themselves in the role of the protagonist reporter who seeks only to convey truthful information to the public, this lawsuit is really about computer hackers and the tools of digital piracy.”White’s statement is bizarrely backwards. This lawsuit cannot be “about computer hackers and the tools of digital piracy.” If it were, it would be directed against the code’s creator, Johansen. Instead, the target is a publisher.Attorney Robin Gross of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing Mr. Corley and 2600.org, got it right when she said that there are “much larger social implications in how the public is going to be able to access and use information in a digital world.” If the MPAA wins the case, the dissemination of public information is undermined; the First Amendment right to free speech is infringed upon.The fight against hyperlinks is only one of the fronts the entertainment industry is waging a war on to line their pockets with more cash from the innocent. While the Supreme Court ruled in the 1984 Sony v. Universal Studios case that consumers have a right to record programs off television for personal use, the MPAA hopes to eliminate that right with the next generation of digital televisions and video recorders.Their proposals are far ranging and could have very real affects on how the next generation of Americans view and record television.One of their brilliant ideas involves decreasing the resolution of broadcast digital TV — essentially muddying the picture — to make movies less appealing to download. To quote MPAA vice-president Fritz Attaway, “There is no technology other than downresing to protect it from being copied and retransmitted on the Internet.” The next generation of video recording devices will be handicapped as well. According to Business Week, “If Hollywood has its way, consumers will be able to record only about 90 minutes of TV programming — just less than the average length of a feature film.” My roommate bemoans the idea that sports fans required to work during the broadcast of the World Series will only be able to capture the first 90 minutes of the game.”Steve,” I console him, “that’s the small inconvenience we as consumers have to endure to ensure Hollywood executives are not unduly robbed at the hands of immoral customers who believe that just because they paid $20 grand for a digital TV, VCR and satellite service they can go all willy-nilly and record anything they want.” I suppose if you really wanted to record more than 90 minutes of programming, you could buy two or three machines and program them to consecutively record separate portions of the game. Of course, that might not be possible because wiring two machines in series could possibly trigger some sort of Macrovision-esque signal scrambling like it does in today’s VCRs. Copyright protection schemes affect everyone. For example, my parents own early ’90s televisions without RCA-style composite inputs. When they bought a DVD player last year, I warned them that DVD players didn’t come equipped with TV tuners or coaxial inputs, and that by piggy-backing the inputs through a VCR, they would trip Macrovision encoding, causing the high-resolution image of DVD video to phase in and out.Mom stopped listening from the word “coaxial,” and Dad bought the machine anyway, convinced I’d find a way around this that didn’t involve buying a new television. As luck would have it, the solution presented itself in the form of an inexpensive RF modulator. Now the player in conjunction with the RF mod works as advertised, with the exception that its CD player function refuses to read any kind of CD-R disc.I would object, but I understand that copyright protection is the only way that MPAA can prevent consumers from hurting themselves. To quote the president of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, “If we have to file a thousand lawsuits a day, we’ll do it.” Thank you, Jack.Sam Wong is a sophomore in electrical engineering. All your base are belong to us.