The District Court for the Northern District of California granted the summary judgment petitioned for the movie industry’s representatives in the case of 321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios Inc., et al. This decision comes from a suit filed by 321, seeking a declaratory judgment as protection from the assertion by movie studios of claims under the anti-circumvention provisions contained in §1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.321’s Claims
321 sought protection from all three forms of application of §1201, namely those forbidding the anti-circumvention of electronic protection measures, as well as trafficking in such and marketing them. In so doing, it submitted that (i) its activities in distributing to programs that allow for copying of DVDs don’t violate provisions of §1201 of the DMCA, or (ii) that such provisions are invalid in light of other copyright law provisions, (iii) that Congress exceed its enumerated powers under the copyright clause of the Constitution, (iv) that said provisions are unconstitutionally vague, and/or (v) that they violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.
321 attempted to rely on the arguments put forth before, such as that its products were not primarily designed and produced to circumvent a technological measure, that they don’t have limited commercially significant purposes other than to circumvent CSS, and that the prohibition against marketing a product for use in circumventing such protection violates the First Amendment.
However the Court found the three subsections of §1201 applicable to 321 on the grounds that (i) the purchase of a DVD does not afford authority to decrypts CSS, (ii) that its products are make unauthorized use of the keys to bypass CSS, and (iii) that they are marketed for use in circumventing CSS.
Matters of Constitutionality
321 also challenged the constitutionality of §1201. It argued that the anti-circumvention provision unconstitutionally burdens the fair use rights of users of copyrighted material. To dismiss this argument the Court relied on the Eldred opinion, in that the burden of the DMCA bears less heavily when speakers assert the right to make other people’s speeches, which would be that contained in the protected works.
It also argued that the DMCA exceeds the scope of the Commerce and Copyright Clauses of the Constitution. With regards to the Commerce Clause, the Court found that the hurtful effect of piracy on the market for legitimate copies of protected works affords Congress authority to pass §1201; it also found that the fair use exception of §107 of the Copyright Act does not afford a right to make such fair use in a chosen format, so the boundaries of the Copyright Clause were not overstepped. Hence neither Clause had been violated.
As regards the claims of First Amendment violations arising out of the regulation of computer code on the basis of its content, the Court found that the relevant provisions of the DMCA were not aimed at the content of the computer code concerned itself, but at its form of operation as a circumvention device. This separation of the functional and expressional aspects of the code is possible, the Court stated, under the intermediate level of scrutiny set for freedom of speech in computer code.