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Tech geeks hoping for juicy details from a closely watched trial involving RealNetworks are likely to find Friday?s proceedings a bit disappointing. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel closed much of the first day?s action to the public after an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association said questioning would reveal too many trade secrets.

The witness with the top-secret information was Dr. John Kelly, of Kelly Technology Group, a consultancy in Santa Barbara, Calif. that specializes in computers and intellectual property. Some of his testimony early in the day was public, but when it got down to meaty questions about the specifications of DVD copy protection, courtroom bystanders got the heave-ho. That includes reporters from CNET, the Associated Press, the Daily Journal, Wired, and the local ABC affiliate.

"I find that this does meet the requirements for a trade secret," Patel said. "We're going to protect what needs to be protected. I'm ordering everyone not signed off on a confidentiality agreement to leave the courtroom."

"The MPAA is trying to seal proprietary specifications," said DVD-CCA attorney Reginald Steer. He added: "This is critical to our presentation."

Steer said the trade secrets related to licensing technology and CSS, or Content Scrambling System, which is an algorithm used to encrypt DVDs. DVD-CCA once filed a lawsuit against programmer Jon Johansen, who wrote a DVD-descrambling utility that circumvented CSS--a suit that had the unintended consequence of publicizing the code widely, including on ties, T-shirts, and at least one haiku poem.

Corynne McSherry, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has been following this case and was in the courtroom, said Patel chose an unfortunate procedure when barring the public from the room on Friday.

"She implied that we should have filed a motion preemptively," McSherry said. "If that's true, the public shouldn't have to go to court to make the courtroom stay open...Presumably the plaintiffs had known for months that they were planning to close this hearing. This is not the right way to do it."