Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley (originally known as Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes), 273 F.3d 429 (2nd Cir., 2001), was a court ruling at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The ruling was the first significant test of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Background Eight plaintiffs, all movie studios, sought an injunction against the distribution of DeCSS, a program capable of decrypting video content that had been encrypted by the Content Scramble System, which was commonly used to protect DVDs. DeCSS was developed by Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen and released in October 1999 via LiViD, a mailing list focused on producing programming tools and software libraries relevant to DVD use on the Linux operating system. DeCSS was distributed by LiViD and other Internet communities without authorization from the DVD Copy Control Association, the trade organization responsible for DVD copy protection. District court proceedings In January 2000, the movie studios filed suit under the title Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants were Eric Corley (publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine, which copied the DeCSS code for its readers), Shawn Reimerdes (who had posted the code on dvd-copy.com, a personal website), Roman Kazan (who ran an Internet hosting service that provided access to DeCSS), and 2600 Enterprises, Inc. The studios claimed that the defendants, by making DeCSS available, were trafficking in circumvention devices, an illegal act under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The studios sought an injunction that would prohibit the distribution and use of the DeCSS program, as well as monetary damages. At the beginning of the proceedings, the district court granted a preliminary injunction barring the defendants from posting the code for DeCSS. The court felt this precaution was necessary given that the movie studios made a reasonable argument that widespread dissemination of DeCSS would cause irreparable harm to their interests. Reimerdes and Kazan then entered into consent decrees with the plaintiffs and were subsequently dropped from the suit. Both were then barred from posting the DeCSS code or providing links to sites where the code could be found. Corley removed the DeCSS code from 2600.com after the preliminary injunction was issued, but did not reach a settlement of his own with the plaintiffs and remained a defendant in the suit. In what