US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has thrown out an emergency stay that barred a former webmaster from putting DVD decryption programs on the Internet.

Judge O'Connor had imposed the stay last week, at the urging of a group that licenses software to film studios to block the illegal copying of DVDs.

New York attorney Jeffrey Kessler said the association fears that Matthew Pavlovich will repost programs that help people duplicate movies for free.

Mr Pavlovich's lawyer said that he has no plans to do that and argued to O'Connor in filings that the stay was unnecessary because decryption programs are already available on hundreds of other Web sites and that they've been printed in magazines and newspapers.

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