Universal City Studios v. Corley

Citation: Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp.2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000), aff'd sub nom. Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley,'' 273 F.3d 429 (2d Cir. 2001).

Factual Background
The plaintiffs were motion picture studios that distributed motion pictures for home use on digital versatile discs (DVDs) and protected them from being copied using an encryption system called the Content Scramble System (CSS). The encrypted DVDs could only be viewed &mdash; not copied &mdash; on players and computer drives equipped with the licensed decryption technology.

In September 1999, a fifteen-year-old Norwegian, Jon Johansen, and two other individuals reverse engineered a licensed DVD player and discovered the CSS encryption algorithm and keys. Based on this information, they created DeCSS, a program capable of decrypting or “ripping” encrypted DVDs. Defendants posted the DeCSS code on their website.

District Court Decision
The studios filed suit against defendant Eric Corley and others for violation of 17 U.S.C. §1201. They sought to enjoin the defendants from posting DeCSS and to prevent them from electronically “linking” their site to others that post it. The court reviewed the development of CSS &mdash; a means to control access to the plaintiff’s copyrighted work &mdash; and determined that DeCSS is “clearly a means of circumventing” it. DeCSS’ creators explained that the program was not developed to pirate copyrighted movies but to further development of a DVD player that would run under a Linux, as opposed to a Windows, operating system. The district court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and issued a permanent injunction against the posting of DeCSS.

Appellate Court Decision
On appeal, defendants/appellants argued that the DMCA unconstitutionally eliminates fair use. The court rejected this as an “extravagant claim.” Reviewing Supreme Court dicta, the Court of Appeals noted that “the Supreme Court has never held that fair use is constitutionally required. . . .” But the court declined to examine further the relationship between fair use and the constitution, because fair use was not at issue. The defendants did not claim to be engaged in fair use; they were being enjoined from trafficking in a decryption code that enabled unauthorized access to copyrighted materials. The lower court had noted that there was scant evidence to determine the extent to which the anti-trafficking provisions of the DMCA prevents others from copying DVD movies in order to make fair use of them.

Finally, addressing the relationship between access and fair use, the appellate court found that fair use has never been held to be a guarantee of access to copyrighted material in order to copy it by the fair user’s preferred technique or in the format of the original:


 * Appellants have provided no support for their premise that fair use of DVD

movies is constitutionally required to be made by copying the original work in its original format. . . . ''We know of no authority for the proposition that fair use, as protected by the Copyright Act, much less the Constitution, guarantees copying by the optimum method or in the identical format of the original. . . .'' [T]he DMCA does not impose even an arguable limitation on the opportunity to make a variety of traditional fair uses of DVD movies, such as commenting on their content, quoting excerpts from their screenplays, and even recording portions of the video images and sounds on film or tape by pointing a camera, a camcorder, or a microphone at a monitor as it displays the DVD movie. The fact that the resulting copy will not be as perfect or as manipulable as a digital copy obtained by having direct access to the DVD movie in its digital form, provides no basis for a claim of unconstitutional limitation of fair use.

As examples, the court suggested that a constitutionally-based assertion of fair use permits neither the film critic to use a movie camera in a theater to review a film, nor the art student to make fair use of a painting by photographing it in a museum.