Abstract: This article discusses the ongoing court battle between the Motion Picture Association of America, supported by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and various defendants over the DeCSS program and its source code . DeCSS is a utility that allows you to bypass the encryption built into most DVDs. Specifically, the article examines the implications of the court's decision on a number of issues including source code such as free speech, HTML linking, and fair use. In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Congress intended the bill to update U.S. copyright laws to address digital media. They believed that digital media such as DVDs would be pirated in large numbers because digital copies were supposed to look exactly like the original. The solution was encryption and the DMCA was enacted to protect copyright in encrypted digital media. A year later, a program called DeCSS appeared, capable of cracking DVD encryption. The first challenge to the DMCA began when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed lawsuits against individuals trafficking in the software on the Internet. The ongoing court case has raised serious issues about the Internet and the digital age, including topics such as HTML linking, source code as protected free speech, and the consumer's right to fair use. The DeCSS program was created by a group of three European programmers who called themselves Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE). The media usually attributes its creation to a Norwegian teenager, Jon Johansen, even though he claimed that he did not perform even the crucial part of the decryption [1]. DeCSS was created to provide a method of playing DVDs under Linux, which at the time did not have a program capable of playing DVDs. To understand the basics of the MPAA's case, you first need to understand the encryption scheme used by DVDs and how DeCSS bypasses it to facilitate playback. Most DVDs use an encryption method called Content Scrambling System (CSS). With CSS, each encrypted DVD contains a key that is used in conjunction with a key in the player to decrypt the contents of the DVD. The DVD Copy Control Association (DVDCCA), the holder of the CSS license, issues the DVD player key to authorized DVD player manufacturers [2]. DeCSS uses a valid but unlicensed key to decrypt the DVD contents.