DeCSS source code that allegedly contained trade secrets was protected by First Amendment

Abstract

First, the court found that DeCSS was "speech" that is within the scope of the First Amendment. DVDCCA had claimed that DeCSS was insufficiently expressive to qualify as protected speech because it was composed of source code and had a functional aspect. The court found, however, that regardless of who authored the program, DeCSS was a written expression of the author's ideas and information about decryption of DVDs without CSS.