person who acquired the information, and the defendants did not themselves do any reverse
engineering (DeCSS had been created by a third party). Even if the defendants had authored
DeCSS, the court ruled that Section 1201(f)(3) would allow the dissemination only of
information gleaned from the reverse engineering and solely for the purpose of achieving
interoperability as defined in the statute (which was not the reason the defendants posted
DeCSS), and not dissemination of the means of circumvention itself.^988 Second, the defendants
could not claim that the sole purpose of DeCSS was to create a Linux DVD player, because
DeCSS was developed on and ran under the Windows operating system, and could therefore
decrypt and play DVD movies on Windows as well as Linux machines.^989 In addition, in an
earlier opinion, the court ruled that Section 1201(f) was inapplicable because the legislative
history of the DMCA makes clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of
copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological
systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies.^990
(ii) Storage Technology Corporation v. Custom
Hardware Engineering & Consulting
This case rejected an assertion of a Section 1201(f) defense because the defendant’s
circumvention resulted in an infringing copy of the plaintiff’s copyrighted program being made
in RAM, and the Section 1201(f) defense exempts circumvention only if it does not result in
copyright infringement. For a discussion of the details of the case, see Section II.G.1(o)(4)
below.
(iii) Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies,
Inc.
The facts of this case are set forth in Section II.G.1(o)(2) below. Although this case did
not directly adjudicate the scope of the Section 1201(f) exemptions, the court made a few
statements in dicta suggesting that Section 1201(f) acts to immunize interoperability from anti-
circumvention liability. In that case, the Federal Circuit ruled that the anti-circumvention
provisions of Section 1201 do not apply to all forms of circumvention to gain access to a work,
but rather only to circumventions that facilitate some form of copyright infringement.^991 The
(^988) Id.
(^989) Id.
(^990) Universal City Studios Inc. v. Reimerdes, 82 F. Supp. 2d 211, 218 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) (citing S. Rep. No. 105-190
(1998) and H.R. Rep. 105-551 (II) (1998)). Section 1201(f) would seem applicable to the original reverse
engineering that the developers of DeCSS engaged in, but the trickier issue dealt with by the court is whether it
should apply to subsequent use of the DeCSS to gain access to copyrighted works stored on a DVD in order to
play such works under the Linux operating system. Such access is for use of the work stored on the DVD
(albeit in an interoperable way), whereas the exception speaks in terms of “identifying and analyzing” the
copyrighted work to achieve interoperability. In addition, Section 1201(f) appears to be a defense only to the
conduct of circumvention prohibited by Section 1201(a)(1), and not to the distribution of devices prohibited
under Sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b). Because the court found that DeCSS is a device within the prohibition
of Section 1201(a)(2), it was not subject to the exception of Section 1201(f).
(^991) Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc., 381 F.3d 1178, 1195, 1203 (Fed. Cir. 2004), cert.
denied, 161 L. Ed. 2d 481 (2005).