Music giants slam DVD cracking tool

Less than a year after the movie world won a court case to ban DVD copying tool DeCSS, the most outlawed software on the internet is back, cracking DVD encryption in just seven lines of code.

The consonant-friendly program Qrpff was developed by a student at MIT to be used as an argument at a seminar on the legal intricacies of DeCSS, but now the tool is cropping up all over the internet.

Qrpff is a seven-line program written in Perl, which uses an encryption key to eliminate the Content Scrambling System (CSS) in DVD protection. The tool, like DeCSS, allows the content of DVDs to be copied and published on the internet.

The original DeCSS was allegedly created so that DVD movies could be decoded and played on Linux machines, as the encoding technique used by DVD manufacturers is Windows only. But the outcome of the US trial made it illegal to publish the code that comprises the DeCSS tool.

However, the author of Qrpff, Keith Winstein, defended his idea that "anyone can write these seven lines of code on a piece of paper and give it to someone", saying that it can be distributed as literary writing and is therefore part of free expression.

But the tool could still lay the foundations for another court battle, this time between Winstein and the movie world.

Currently the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is made up of companies with interests in DVD, is analysing the new program but still has to make a decision on it.