Editing DeCSS (section)

== Legal response ==

The first legal threats against sites hosting DeCSS, and the beginning of the DeCSS mirroring campaign, began in early November 1999 (''[[Universal v. Reimerdes]]''). The preliminary injunction in ''[[DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. v. Bunner]]'' followed soon after, in January 2000. As a response to these threats a program also called DeCSS but with an unrelated function was developed. This program can be used to strip [[Cascading Style Sheets]] tags from [[HTML]] pages. In one case, a school{{which|date=July 2021}} removed a student's webpage that included a copy of this program, mistaking it for the original DeCSS program, and received a great deal of negative media attention.<!--ref name-"pigdog"; read sources before stamping--> The CSS stripping program had been specifically created to bait the [[Motion Picture Association of America|MPAA]] in this manner.<ref name="pigdog">{{cite web | title=Pigdog Journal - DeCSS Distribution Center | url=http://www.pigdog.org/decss/ | access-date=28 May 2007 | archive-date=7 August 2018 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180807125250/http://www.pigdog.org/decss/ | url-status=live }}</ref>

In protest against legislation that prohibits publication of copy protection circumvention code in countries that implement the [[WIPO Copyright Treaty]] (such as the [[United States]]' [[Digital Millennium Copyright Act]]), some have devised clever ways of distributing descriptions of the DeCSS algorithm, such as through [[steganography]], through various Internet protocols, on T-shirts and in dramatic readings, as [[MIDI]] files, as a [[haiku]] poem ([[DeCSS haiku]]),<ref>{{cite web |title=How to decrypt a DVD - in Haiku form |first=Seth |last=Schoen |url=http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt |access-date=5 December 2005 |archive-date=20 June 2005 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050620081718/http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=The history of the DeCSS Haiku |first=Seth |last=Schoen |url=http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/haiku.html |access-date=25 February 2012 |archive-date=28 June 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180628105651/http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/haiku.html |url-status=live }}</ref> and even as a so-called [[illegal prime|illegal prime number]].<ref>{{cite web |title=Gallery of CSS Descramblers |first=David S. |last=Touretzky |author-link=David S. Touretzky |url=https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery |access-date=25 February 2012}}</ref>