Saying California's economy is threatened by computer-aided piracy, Attorney General Bill Lockyer joined the movie industry Thursday in urging the state Supreme Court to forbid the Internet posting of a program that lets users copy DVDs.

Making his second appearance ever before the high court, Lockyer asked the justices to reject a state appellate court's ruling that a San Francisco man was exercising free speech when he posted the program in 1999.

Lockyer said the unscrambling program, devised by a Norwegian teenager, was simply "a burglary tool" designed for "breaking, entering and stealing" a trade secret -- the industry-owned code designed to prevent unauthorized playback of movies recorded on digital versatile discs, or DVDs.

The state is taking sides in the private dispute in order to "prevent and combat piracy . . . encourage investment (and) promote the creative arts," Lockyer said. He said the motion picture industry estimates that as many as 350,000 movies are copied illegally every day, and recording companies are losing billions of dollars from unauthorized copying.

A lawyer for Andrew Bunner, the young software engineer whose use of his Web site landed him in the middle of a heavyweight fight, countered that a court injunction obtained by an industry group was intended to "stop the flow of information." Bunner did nothing wrong, and the program he posted is so readily available now that it can't be described as a trade secret, added attorney David Greene.

But several justices at the one-hour hearing seemed receptive to arguments by Lockyer and the DVD Copy Control Association that an injunction against the posting of the code would protect legitimate property rights without stifling free speech.

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