Hollywood creative types are well-acquainted with the martyr theme: Just think of Mel Gibson's pre-decapitation cry of "Freedom!" in Braveheart, or the numerous Joan of Arcs who've endured picturesque on-screen immolation. But Tinseltown's boardroom habitues must be skipping their own screenings, for they've fallen into the same trap as countless celluloid tyrants. The suits who greenlighted The Postman have made yet another epic gaffe: They martyred Eric Corley. Corley, publisher of the hacker zine 2600, graced page C1 of the New York Times last Friday, striking an arms-crossed pose that oozed defiance. He had just been ordered by a federal judge, at the request of the Motion Picture Association of America, to cease posting a DVD-decoding program on his Web site. Now Corley, who fancies himself a political agitator in the Abbie Hoffman vein, is the media's stone-flinging David du jour, an earnest pro-freedom muckraker with a quick wit and appealingly bohemian wardrobe. Since appeals are promised, the MPAA faces the unsavory prospect of their scraggly-haired nemesis delivering his soft-spoken testimony atop the Supreme Court's steps.

The MPAA would have been well-advised to ignore Corley's meager operation. 2600 is scarcely Reader's Digest -- its print circulation is only a few thousand -- and the typical visitor to the Web site is a harmless adolescent technophile. But with its founder's name suddenly synonymous with "Fuck the Man!" politics, 2600 is destined to become a staple of civil-libertarian chic. The "source code equals speech" argument posed by Corley's lawyers, once familiar solely to in-the-know nerds, is certain to become the phrase that launched a thousand editorials, if only for its alliterative catchiness. And the lawsuit's continuing saga will inspire critical analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the1998 law that forbids the distribution of software used to circumvent copyright protections.

The MPAA insists that Corley's martyrdom was necessary because the decoding program in question, known as DeCSS, was being used to pirate DVDs, thus threatening MPAA President Jack Valenti's ability to afford dinner at Spago on a thrice-weekly basis. According to this scenario, 2600's fan base of fourteen-year-old hackers are already sapping Hollywood's coffers by playing bootlegged copies of Austin Powers on their Linux boxes. And once the average American discovers DeCSS, the theory goes, the days of store-bought DVDs will be but distant memories. For an industry that thrives on the assumption that people will pay nine dollars to see a flick about a baseball-playing chimp, the movie business seems to be giving Americans an awful lot of credit. If the typical computer user was so inclined, he'd be learning how to burn his own John Tesh CDs instead of paying Tower Records $14.98 for the right to hear Live at Red Rocks. Never, ever underestimate the laziness of Joe Q. Public.

The most ludicrous aspect of the drama, however, is the MPAA's assumption that DeCSS can be rebottled like an evil genie. Now that it has been invested with the aura of taboo, the program will be in higher demand than ever. And unless all of Clinton's hundred thousand new cops are assigned to Web-monitoring duty, there is zero possibility that the code-breaker can be contained. The hacker credo is "Information Wants to Be Free" -- like life itself, its replication and spread is resistant to human-erected barriers. The MPAA's lawyers can write cease-and-desist orders until Judgment Day, but DeCSS will thrive in the unpoliced nooks and crannies of cyberspace. In fact, given the program's newfound infamy, it will probably be posted as a rebellious badge-of-honor on many sites. And previously unpoliticized geeks -- taking a cue from the greatest screen martyr of them all -- will puff out their chests and declare, in their best Spartacus-inspired voices, "I am Eric Corley!"