On December 29, the DVD Copy Control Association filed suit in California against 72 people, charging them with disseminating trade secrets—specifically, distributing software called DeCSS. This utility cracks CSS (Content Scrambling System), a copy-protection algorithm built into the DVD-Video standard. The following month, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed its own suits against three defendants in New York, charging them with violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act for posting the DVD hack on the Web.

The outcome of these cases may redefine what constitutes piracy and whether consumers will have any say in how they can use copyrighted content.

The defendants and their supporters in the open source software community argue that DeCSS allows Linux users merely to access the content on DVDs—putting them on equal footing with Windows or Mac OS users. "The process of reverse-engineering and public posting and commenting of code that the MPAA is attempting to suppress is fundamental to the development of commercial and open source software," says Tara Lemmey, executive director of the San Francisco–based Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The motion picture industry is using its substantial resources to intimidate the technical community into surrendering rights of free expression and fair use of information."

The MPAA counters that by circumventing copy protection, the hackers are jeopardizing nothing less than "the future of American movies" by facilitating piracy.

These lawsuits demonstrate that old-school thinking about the nature of intellectual property is increasingly on a crash course with the open source movement—and, many argue, with a concept of "property" that makes allowances for public access rather than fencing it off.