The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) Thursday filed an Amicus Curiae, or "friend of the court," brief with the California Supreme Court on behalf of an out-of-state defendant in a DVD-copying software publication case. The group is urging the court to overturn a lower court ruling that the developer must stand trial in California even though he doesn"t live there.
In its brief, the CCIA said a California appeals court erred when it ruled the state has jurisdiction over Matthew Pavlovich and ordered him to stand trial in California.
Pavlovich, an open-source developer who played a role in the creation of DVD-playing software for Linux known as LiViD, is one of a number of defendants targeted in a lawsuit filed by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA). Pavlovich, who was a student at Purdue University in Indiana at the time of the filing of the complaint and now resides in Texas, claimed to have no contacts in California and argued that the state has no jurisdiction over him.
Pavlovich owned and operated a Web site where he posted a program called DeCSS. The appeals court described DeCSS as a computer program designed to "defeat" the DVD CCA"s encryption-based copy protection system, known as the Content Scramble System, or CSS, which is "employed to encrypt and protect the copyrighted motion pictures contained on digital versatile discs, or DVDs."