Friday, July 26, 2002

Law Student Sues Web-Filtering Company in a Challenge to Millennium Copyright Act By ANDREA L. FOSTER A first-year student at Harvard University's law school is suing an Internet filtering company as part of his effort to view and distribute a concealed list of Web sites that the company deems pornographic. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court, is the latest challenge by an academic researcher to the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The student, Benjamin G. Edelman, asked a judge to prevent the firm, N2H2 Inc., from suing him under the digital-copyright law should he decide to bypass the company's encryption, which prevents him from discovering its complete list of blocked Web sites. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is arguing the case for Mr. Edelman, filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Boston. A copy of the complaint is available on the ACLU's Web site (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free). A spokesman for N2H2, based in Seattle, said Thursday afternoon that the company had not been officially notified of the lawsuit but that it will defend its intellectual-property rights in the case. The digital-copyright law makes it a crime to circumvent a technology designed to control access to a copyrighted work. The law, passed in 1998, makes an exception for some individuals who want to see a list of blocked Web sites. But Mr. Edelman says he fears that exception would not apply to him since he wants to publish his research results. Also, he says he wants to create and distribute software that would allow others to bypass N2H2's encryption, an activity still barred under the act. The lawsuit asks the judge to interpret Mr. Edelman's research as a fair-use exception to the digital copyright law, or to declare unconstitutional the portion of the law that would inhibit his research. Mr. Edelman maintains that N2H2, through its software-filtering programs, has an enormous influence on Internet viewing habits, and that the public has a right to know what methods the company uses to block access to certain Web sites. He notes that the company gained even more clout with the passage of the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2001, which requires public libraries and schools to install technology to prevent children and teenagers from viewing pornographic Web sites. "We have an interest in making sure the software does what it's supposed to be doing," says Mr. Edelman. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, struck down the children's Internet law in May, and the case is being appealed to the Supreme Court. Mr. Edelman, as a Harvard student, was an expert witness in the case for the plaintiff, the American Library Association. He designed and used software that tested the filtering programs of N2H2 and other companies, and testified that their programs blocked many sites that were not pornographic, including medical-research sites about breast cancer. Mr. Edelman works for Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He graduated from Harvard College in the spring with a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's in statistics. At the Berkman Center, he was co-author of a recent report about software used by the government of Saudi Arabia to block access to Internet sites about women, homosexuality, and other topics. Others also have challenged the digital copyright law in court, claiming that it violates their First Amendment right to free speech or impinges scholarly research. But courts have generally been unsympathetic to their arguments. Last November, a federal judge in New Jersey dismissed a lawsuit that Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist, filed against the recording industry. Mr. Felten argued that the law stifled research about encryption that limits access to digital music, and he asked to be shielded from prosecution under the law's provisions. The judge said the recording industry had already agreed not to sue Mr. Felten, so there was no conflict between the litigants. (See an article from The Chronicle, December 14, 2001.) Also last November, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit brought by Eric Corley, an online-magazine publisher. Mr. Corley said the digital-copyright law violated his constitutional rights by preventing him from publishing a software code that can unlock the encryption on digital versatile disks, or DVD's. (See an article from The Chronicle, February 16, 2001.) Background articles from The Chronicle: Judge Dismisses Digital-Copyright Lawsuit by Princeton Professor (12/14/2001) Scholars Rally to Online Magazine's Defense Over Publishing Software Code (2/16/2001) Scholars Decry New Copyright Rule (11/10/2000) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Princeton admissions official breaks into Yale admissions site U.S. Senate committee approves spending boosts for AmeriCorps and NSF 3 freshmen sue U. of North Carolina over assigned reading about Koran Florida Memorial College fires 2 workers and expels 3 students amid grade-changing inquiry Congress increases funds for network-security scholarships by $19.3-million Law student sues Web-filtering company in a challenge to Millennium Copyright Act Senate bill would increase NSF's spending for technology research