WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is siding with Hollywood in a federal lawsuit against a DVD-descrambling utility.

In a 100 KB brief filed this week before a federal appeals court, the Justice Department asked to intervene in the case brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying "this lawsuit is really about computer hackers and the tools of digital piracy."

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals should uphold a lower court's decision banning the hacker-zine 2600 Magazine from distributing or linking to the DeCSS utility in a case brought by eight movie studios in January 2000, the DOJ argues. 2600 has appealed the ruling.

"Under the First Amendment, defendants had every right to use their website to advocate against the DMCA. They also had the right to associate on the Internet with others who support the use of circumvention technology by linking to websites that decry," says the brief, signed by U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White. "But by purposefully linking to websites that post DeCSS for downloading, defendants' actions exceeded advocacy and crossed the line into unlawful action."

On Wednesday, the appeals court granted the DOJ's request to intervene in the lawsuit, which means government lawyers will be allowed to defend the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in court. 2600 has claimed that it did not violate the DMCA and the law violates the First Amendment because it limits programmers' free speech rights.

This isn't the first time that the DOJ has sided with the entertainment industry in court. Last September, the Clinton administration filed an amicus brief in the Napster case saying the file-trading service can't use the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 as a legal shield.

It isn't necessarily true that Attorney General John Ashcroft believes that DeCSS should be verboten. Instead, the DOJ is acting in its traditional role of attorney for Congress in defending the constitutionality of a federal law in court.

In its brief, however, the DOJ sides with Hollywood's extreme view of the open-source community, likening the publishers of the popular hacker-zine -- who did not write DeCSS, but were one of hundreds of people distributing it -- to lawless miscreants bent on wrecking havoc on an important American industry. The plaintiffs in the case warn that unless DeCSS -- and similar programs -- are prohibited, digital piracy will cost them millions of dollars in revenue a year.

Warns the DOJ: "Defendants publish a magazine for computer hackers, which 'has included articles on such topics as how to steal an Internet domain name, access to other people's e-mail, intercept cellular phone calls, and break into computer systems at Costco stores and Federal Express.'"

-Declan McCullagh