Eric Corley, the central figure in the "DVD Hacker" case, who was barred by a court from posting online how to make copies of DVDs, vowed on Wednesday to keep fighting the copyright law the ruling was based on, and which he says oppresses more and more people each day.
"We have every intention of continuing to challenge this ruling because this is such a vital issue," Corley said.
Corley"s lawyers on Jan. 14 requested a rehearing by the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals Court in New York after a three-judge panel ruled in November that Corley"s publishing of the DVD descrambling software on his 2600 magazine Web site was not protected by free speech provisions.
This brings to light, three cases involving the DMCA and the act of breaking or writing software that circumvents copy protection schemes in the past year.
Along with Eric Corley, a Russian programmer (Dmitry Sklyarov) spent six months in an American prison after he wrote and demonstrated software which Adobe objected to, and the Norwegian programmer (Jon Johansen) who helped write the DeCSS code (CSS is the Content Scramble System, used as a safeguards on DVDs) got indicted a couple of weeks ago.