Experts speaking in defense of hacker magazine 2600 say a ruling that prevents sites from linking to a controversial DVD-descrambling utility imperils traditional free speech.

A federal judge should not order 2600.com to yank hyperlinks to the DeCSS program from its website because it "would constitute a gross prior restraint of speech," 2600 magazine says in court documents filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New York.

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"As part of its role as an organ of the media, 2600 took the same actions as other media outlets such as the San Jose Mercury News, CNN.com, Wired (News), and ZDNet, which all at one time also linked directly to DeCSS," wrote Martin Garbus, a well-known civil liberties attorney at Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein and Selz who is representing 2600.

After being sued in January by motion picture studios for distributing DeCSS, 2600 deleted the program from its website but continued to link to mirror sites. The plaintiffs include Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Disney Enterprises, and 20th Century Fox.

In response, the movie studios in early April asked U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to order 2600 to delete the links. The studios argued Kaplan should "prohibit the 2600 defendants from deliberately 'linking' to other Internet websites offering DeCSS," saying it was a contributory copyright infringement.

2600 says such a rule would amount to a prior restraint on publication, something that the Supreme Court has determined should be allowed only in very narrow circumstances. The First Amendment's "chief purpose" is "to prevent previous restraints upon publication (that are) essence of censorship," the high court said in Near v. Minnesota in 1931.

Kaplan sided with the movie industry plaintiffs in January, granting a temporary injunction against sites that distributed DeCSS.

2600 also argues that portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is what the movie studios are using to try to block DeCSS distribution, are so vague that they run afoul of the First Amendment.

"(The court's earlier ruling) gives the public no coherent guidance as to what speech may be barred and, particularly in connection with the linking motion, is so vague and all-embracing as to prohibit an immense amount of protected speech," 2600's filing states.

Included in the document are declarations from well-known computer science professors and academics, including MIT's Hal Abelson, Andrew Appel of Princeton University, and Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's general counsel.

The declarations are designed to buttress 2600's weak defense against the movie industry's assertions that the utility could allow widespread piracy of DVDs. The filing argues that DeCSS does not run afoul of U.S. copyright law, and posed no real threat to the motion picture industry.

"I do not believe that posting or linking to DeCSS poses any real threat of leading to copying DVDs, or to the distribution of modes for copying DVDs," writes Barbara Simons, the president of the Association of Computing Machinery.

"It is my belief that source code is expressive speech meriting the full protection of the First Amendment," said Dave Touretzky, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.

"I am concerned that this court issued an order prohibiting the defendants from posting source code for CSS decryption algorithms on the Internet."