On January 20, 2000, United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in Universal City Studios et al. v. Reimerdes et al., prohibiting the defendants from distributing computer code for reading encrypted DVDs. The defendants had been sued under 17 USC 1201(a)(2), also known as section 1201(a)(2) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Judge Kaplan subsequently issued a memorandum order in which he indicated that executable source code was not subject to First Amendment protection against prior restraint of speech. This finding is contrary to that of the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, who ruled in the Bernstein cryptography case that source code is indeed protected speech. In their decision, The 9th Circuit even quoted some Scheme code from the declaration of MIT Professor Harold Abelson, explaining why source code is an effective and sometimes preferred means of human communication. Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University also filed a declaration explaining the importance for computer science of being able to publish source code. More recently, the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in the Junger cryptography case that, independent of its functional significance, the expressive nature of source code affords it First Amendment protection.

If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn? This web site was created to explore this issue, and point out the absurdity of Judge Kaplan's position that source code can be legally differentiated from other forms of written expression.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/