Thursday, April 10, 2003

Federal Judge Throws Out Harvard Law Student's Challenge to Digital-Copyright Law By ANDREA L. FOSTER In another setback for foes of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit that a first-year student at Harvard University's law school brought against an Internet filtering company. The student, Benjamin G. Edelman, sought to view and distribute a concealed list of Web sites that the company, N2H2 Inc., deems pornographic. In the lawsuit, he asked the court to prevent N2H2 from suing him under the terms of digital-copyright law if he decided to bypass the company's encryption, which hides the list of Web sites that N2H2's filtering software blocks (The Chronicle, October 18, 2002). The law makes it illegal to circumvent a technology designed to control access to a copyrighted work. Computer scientists, among others, have complained repeatedly about the anti-circumvention provision, which they say limits their ability to study encryption techniques and other aspects of cutting-edge technology. But Judge Richard G. Stearns, of U.S. District Court in Boston, ruled that Mr. Edelman has no "plausibly protected constitutional interest" that outweighs N2H2's "right to protect its copyrighted property from an invasive and destructive trespass." "The court has no inkling of the exact dimension of the research that Edelman proposes to undertake and doubts that Edelman does either," Judge Stearns wrote. "Nor does the court have any idea of the full content of what Edelman proposes to publish." (Judge Stearns's ruling is available online. It can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free.) In November 2001, a federal judge in New Jersey also dismissed a lawsuit involving the digital-copyright law. Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist, had sought to have a judge declare the law unconstitutional (The Chronicle, December 14, 2001). Background articles from The Chronicle: Web-Filtering Company Seeks to Block Lawsuit Filed by Law Student (10/18/2002) 'Politics of Control' Leads a Law Student to Challenge Digital-Copyright Act (9/13/2002) Student Sues Web-Filtering Company in Challenge to Millennium Copyright Act (8/9/2002) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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