Each time a new technology is developed, you can bet that Hollywood will do their best to sabotage it. They resisted sound, colour, television, video recorders and the DVD, but eventually they adapted to the new realities and found ways to work with technology, rather than against it.
The digital world has had a bigger impact on the film industry than anything since sound. And the longer studios try to resist it, the more likely they are to go the way of the silent movie.
The latest Hollywood lawsuit, filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) against a software firm named 321 Studios and several of its customers, is yet another case of copyright owners vainly attempting to turn the tide against the consumers' needs. 321's crime, and the judge shows every indication she will rule it is a crime, is to distribute DeCSS - a freeware application that circumvents the industry's Content Scrambling System (CSS) to encrypt DVD data.
The software was written so that a Norwegian teenager could watch his own DVDs on his Linux computer. But 321 and the other five defendants use DeCSS so that Windows users can make copies of DVDs.
In the United States, this is known as circumvention, and contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA criminalises any software that can be used for bypassing copyright protection. The law has been criticised by free-speech groups as an infringement of the US First Amendment.
The developers' defence is fair use. They argue that, just as an individual is legally entitled to make back-up copies of films on video, music on CD and even software, they have the same right to make copies of their own DVDs.