Whoops.

In a hastily arranged hearing Wednesday morning, DVD CCA lawyers asked Santa Clara Superior Court Judge William J. Elfving to correct their oversight, and he agreed to keep the document confidential.

It may be a little late. The document is dated 13 January and is widely available on the Web. The owner of one site that placed the 140KB declaration online says over 21,000 people have downloaded it so far.

The 11KB "CSSscramble" source code, part of the larger declaration of DVD CCA president John Hoy, cannot be readily compiled into a DVD viewer or copier.

But if it had not been released online last October, the DVD encryption scheme likely would not have been penetrated.

Elfving granted an injunction last Friday, ordering 21 defendants to stop posting DeCSS software -- which allows compressed video images to be copied from a DVD disc onto a hard drive -- on their Web sites.

The blunder won't help the DVD CCA attorneys in their as-yet quixotic quest to rid the Net of DeCSS. The entertainment industry frets that such programs could eventually allow widespread piracy of movies.

One California litigator who specializes in Internet and intellectual property cases says the boner won't derail the DVDCCA's lawsuit filed last month in state court.