DVD industry sues code crackers

The DVD Copy Control Association Inc. has filed suit against 21 individuals and 72 Web sites for posting information and utilities designed to break the copy protection on DVD movies.

Two months ago, an international open source project culminated with the publishing of methods for circumventing the encryption that protects DVD movies.

The groups responsible for reverse-engineering the code have voluntarily taken down the information to avoid a costly lawsuit. However, the DVD industry is pressing charges, targeting a number of sites and individuals that provided links to the code-cracking information.

A detailed analysis of the issue appears at www.zdnn.com .