Unfortunately for the DVD consortium, CSS was cracked and a program called DeCSS was released to enable you to de-scramble the DVD content (in effect enabling people to copy movies off DVDs and distribute them on the net).

DeCSS does not enable you to copy and distribute movies - you can just as easily distribute the scrambled digital content. What it does enable you to do is to write an unlicensed DVD player. If DeCSS is judged illegal it's highly unlikely that there'll ever be a free software DVD player (in either the "free beer" or the "free speech" sense).

Read http://www.cssfaq.org/ for more on this, it's a great page.

Borislav