Fast forward to Friday. Patel excluded several reporters from the same courtroom in a case testing Hollywood’s lock on the DVD. The press, including Wired, CNET, Reuters, Bloomberg News Service, The New York Times and The Associated Press and other outlets were ordered removed as the guts of the case got underway.
Patel said the code of the Content Scramble System used to encrypt DVDs and prevent their copying was a “trade secret.” She told the press to scram when a University of California at Davis computer science scholar was called to testify about whether RealNetworks’ DVD copying software circumvented the CSS.