Federal Judge Rules Against Reverse-engineering 601
zurab writes "A federal judge in Boston threw out a challenge to the DMCA brought by the ACLU for a Harvard Law School student. Ben Edelman decided to ask court's permission to reverse-engineer the Internet filtering software made by N2H2 in fears of being sued by the company. Of interest is a quote from the ruling: "there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an invasive and destructive trespass." Full story on Yahoo."
my school uses that.. (Score:5, Informative)
btw, fp!
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:4, Funny)
BTW, I actually am at a school that uses Bess, an N2H2 product. It banned Slashdot for being a "Message Board." I have a good mind to go there and give those networking bastards a piece of my mind.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Interesting)
So these schools using Bess/etc. are basically saying "Go to msnbc.com / aol.com / cnn.com all you want, since they're nice big corporations, but don't discuss things amongst yourselves?" What is the justification given? Or is none at all given (as is typical nowadays)?
I am confused.
My good friend works at an office using WebSense (which both of us now call WebSenseless). It has, in the past, blocked her from accessing many perfectly legitimate sites, including my own site-- when I was trying to use my site to send her a technical document. It was very annoying.
All these years, and censorware still hasn't gotten better? This is pathetic...
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:4, Informative)
No, primary and secondary schools are designed to shift responsibilities for children off of the parents' backs, so they have someone else to blame when their child doesn't turn out to be Superman and/or Wonderwoman.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:3, Interesting)
See, and I always thought that they were designed to produce a labor force to catapult your 19th-century backwater kingdom into an early 20th-century industrial power [sntp.net]. That, and keep teenagers out of the labor forse.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Insightful)
All I can say is, it must have been awhile since you were a student. The purpose of blocking message board sites is so kids dont dick around when they're supposed to be working, tying up what might be already scanty bandwith (my highschool had 1400 students with several labs and all teachers' computers on a 64k ISDN line.) doing things that are not at all school related.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, schools are expensive day-care centres so parents can work. By keeping children occupied with mindless tedium (aka homework) schools also reduce the juvenille crime rate.
Mod me funny, I dare you. I'm not being funny goddamnit.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, I'll admit some of the politically sensitive oversimplifications in their scientific textbooks were obscene, but not enough to ban them for.
Tried to find the link again, but this is the closest I could come up with on short notice:
http://danny.oz.au/freedom/censorware/if
I know it's not an authoritave source, but this is slashdot.
Breast a banned word? (Score:3, Interesting)
But in all seriousness, it shows how bad of an idea these sort of 'filters' are.. they are flawed by design, and prone to 'political' abuse.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Banning reverse engineering?!?! What's NEXT?! I bet they're going to rule against literary analysis in English! Reading too far into something would endanger the author's critical intellectual property---if we knew *how* he (or she, of course) wrote what he wrote, there would be countless knock-offs and imitators! Oh wait, there already are..... so?
Anyway.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Reverse engineering is independent of copyright violation.
To break a copyright, you make copies of the material.
Reverse-engineering means you come to understand material already in your possesion.
It does not damage copyright at all, except via circular reasoning.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes they have, and that is bad.
The particular court ruling in this article isn't especially applicable (since the judge was simply deciding a particular case was outside his authority).
However, the general character of the DMCA, and the rulings that have followed it, is strongly against reverse engineering!
US citizens were allowed to reproduce copyrighted works when it's necessary or very helpful to u
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:4, Interesting)
*Tongue in Cheek*
The reality of Bess is is that it is unquestionable. Most of my teachers aren't willing to walk over to my computer and type in a password every minutes so that I can actually see the pictures of Mussolini's dead body. (We are covering WWI). The problem lies with Bess and other such filtering software in that its database is inaccurate and beyond reproach. Bess used to allow you to submit webpages that it blocked for reviews, it would even email me telling whether or not the site was allowed. I would usually get a response within 4 days, and they would usually agree with me, that the site shouldn't be blocked. Now, when you try to submit the page, there is no option to allow you to give them your email addy (I didn't use my private one of course), and they don't even allow you submit freepages. They are blocked by default. Without notification, they could never get around to checking the site, and you would never know which way it went unless the site was magically unblocked one day.
I don't even get the point of having a filter at a High School. Very few people are stupid enough to be surfing Pr0n in the middle of library, so what are they afraid of? I dont't knw, maybe I'm just angry because they block
Just my two bits..
P.S. This is my first post! Yay!
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:3, Funny)
Hint: look for the other world war
Better get your timeline straight, boy! Or you may never get that password!
Just use an Anonymizer-type proxy (Score:3, Informative)
FWIW, for you people with minds in the gutter, my employer's new firewall is configured in a screwy way that was preventing me from posting to Slashdot (apparently this was not intentional
Re:Just use an Anonymizer-type proxy (Score:3, Interesting)
Never discount the possibility that whoever set up the filtering is clueless or incompetent. For that matter, the person who set up the filtering system may well have had to do so for legal reasons. Or they may be opposed to such filtering in principle, but not enough to put their job on the line. In which case they may well have conciously not blocked Anonymizer-type sites.
Re:Just use an Anonymizer-type proxy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Interesting)
my highschool (Score:5, Funny)
It's not too bad, because they have an 802.11b net my Zaurus and iBook can access as well as a "secret router" on 10.0.0.3 that I'm not supposed to know about.
BTW, the NT4 proxy is sp2; I made a single URL that can crash the proxy if entered on any school computer. They really should fire the techies and let me do the job for a gym credit.
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:5, Informative)
N2H2's Bess currently blocks an extremely large amount of sites, including google's image search (but not the main google site). It also seemingly blocks by a number of things, including ip address (I think it performs a reverse DNS lookup on every ip as it blocks the octal and hexidecimal ips of site as well) and string. What I mean by string is that you can get to the main Web Archive site (as a loophole), but you can't enter a blocked address there and try to recieve an archive of it. Same deal with google cache.
Another thing is the shear rapidness of blocking. I started playing FlashFlashRevolution.com for about a week, and when I got back to school on monday it was blocked. I asked my Systems admin and he told me he didn't block me, so they must be monitoring bandwidth at some central station.
The FlashFlash ban got me pissed off, so I found some open proxies at my house and manually searched out the internet options control panel file (InetCpl.cpl) to change my proxy settings. Sure enough, this worked. Of course, if you need a new proxy server absolutely every web-based proxy or open proxy list is banned (and you wouldn't believe the number of bans), so I had to VNC to my freebsd box at home to get a list. Sure enough, I can now play flash flash revolution during those boring high school comp science classes.
If anyone has any other suggestions I'd love to hear them
Re:my school uses that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unsigned apps can't run on some installs (Score:5, Informative)
C:\> ren dwi2.exe notepad.exe
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy enough to do, isn't it?
Re:Simple (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, my two cents. One, I'm seeing a trend that these lawsuits keep getting tossed because the issued involved aren't ripe. Two, how does a collection of blocked URLs constitute a copyrighted work?
Re:Simple (Score:4, Funny)
An individual URL might just be a fact, but a collection of facts that's more than just a simple collation (i.e. some creativity went into creating it) can be copyrighted. See this page [lawnotes.com] for more details.
On a side note, does anybody else find it hilarious that the USA Copyright Office gets asked "How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?" [copyright.gov] often enough for them to put it in their FAQ?
NO! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not good enough. Honest people should be able to do honest things in an upright manner. Honest people also demand accontablility and an anonymous list of blocked sites is worthless when the results can't be repeated elsewhere.
This ruling is absolutly outrageous. A Federal jusdge protecting a trade secret with copyright law? It's amazing that laws designed to encourage publishing have been perverted to prevent legitmate research and the useful arts. When did copyright protection of exclusive publication by an author become a prohibiton agaist READING and ANALYZING the thing published?
The following paragraph is a copyrighted ASCI text art diagram with a message protected by an ingenious electronic encryption method called French, available at bablefish [http]. It is intended to form a pleasing pattern of black and white when viewed by a browser. It may not, under any circumstances by coppied or otherwise dessiminated, not even oraly or by heliograph.
Juge Richard Stearns de zone des ETATS-UNIS, ou vous avez la merde pour des cerveaux ou Yahoo vous a fait un grand mauvais service. Si vous prolongeriez la loi de copyright aux secrets commerciaux vous êtes la plupart d'homme d'UnAmerican et avoir violé les serments de votre bureau.
Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
I think it's pretty clear that people who want to analyze and criticize filters can use tools that do not involve decryption.
And what exactly would those be - ESP? Divination with a forked stick? Tarot readings?
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's pretty clear that people who want to analyze and criticize filters can use tools that do not involve decryption.
And what exactly would those be - ESP? Divination with a forked stick? Tarot readings?
The concept exists of a "black box" analysis. In this case you use a random number generator to come up with long string of possible URL's and feed them to the program to see which ones are blocked. You could also do a sequential search, where you feed it urls like a.com, b.com, c.com and so on, through zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.com (or longer if you allow more than 32 characters before the
A random walk should get you close to a comprehensive list earlier than a seqential search, though a dictionary attack may work faster, especially if you include modified dictionary entries such as s3x, 53x, sechs, and so on.
Then again, I could be wrong. Someone might consider that to be decrypting the list.
-Rusty
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Mr. BJH could not be reached for further comment.
Soko
A sad state of affairs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Write to your elected representatives [house.gov]. Do it now.
-S
Re:A sad state of affairs... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was actually thinking about this the other day. What about a slashdot sponsered letter writing compaign that gave people a tangible reward for writing a good letter to thier congress(wo)man.
They could have everyone write an email about what really matter to them, any topic, preferably a technological one as thats what scores points around here. Then have them mail them to thier representative and CC a copy to contest@slashdot.org as well as post it as a comment. Say, 10 highest rated letters win a free subscription (however many page views that is). The cost would be negligable, but the impact of tons of well worded emails coming from intellegent people would have an amazing impact. So, editors, what do YOU think? --btw, the letters should be worded better than this post.
Re:A sad state of affairs... (Score:2)
Great idea. I'm canadian, but I still support it
Re:A sad state of affairs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A sad state of affairs... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A sad state of affairs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the problem is a lot of
So in that way, we whinge about the USA laws, because they will eventually influence our own laws.
Re:Writing your congressman works! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, even without cash (well, other than to buy stamps and paper, or to pay the phone bill), you can get involved. A congressman almost always has a local office in their district that they visit, for at least a few weeks while Congress is not in session. You might want to talk to his staff about getting some time to visit and talk directly while your representative is in town. If you get access, do your homework ahead of time and bring copies of supporting documents that you can give (executive summaries are nice too here).
You can also offer time. If your congresscritter is doing a good job, volunteer to help on their campaign. If your congresscritter is doing a bad job, look over there opposition and see if there's someone there you'd like to help out instead. Nothing modifies a congresscritter's opinion faster than popular support for an opponent with a contrary opinion. If you hate all of these bozos, consider running yourself.
Basically, the more involved and visible you are (in a friendly, non-wacko, non-stalker sort of way), the more likely the congresscritter is to give credibility to your opinion. Involved people don't just vote, they influence other peoples' votes, and that means a lot to someone who is up for reelection every two years.
Re:A sad state of affairs... (Score:3, Funny)
Holy crap the end is near (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Holy crap the end is near: Disagree here (Score:2)
We still have a right to vote. Unfortunately last election, our popular vote (the people) was ignored by the Governer of Florida, the confusion of the divits, and the amount of time they wasted on investigating it drew out the talley of the electorial past the cutoff date.
Because of Florida has more electorial votes, when they swayed towards Bush it was enough (barely) for him to win the presidency.
Re:Holy crap the end is near: Disagree here (Score:2)
Re:Holy crap the end is near: Disagree here (Score:3, Interesting)
Our popular vote is deliberately irrelevant for the presidential election; this is to prevent a few populous states from running off with the election. Hypothetical situation: the electoral college is thrown out, and two candidates are running for the popular vote in an election. Candidate A has run a very tightly targetted (read: lots of gifts and pork to specific locations) ca
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you can't own the product. It's not yours. Not only is it not yours but you can't tinker with it. Tinkering with it is illegal. If the manufacturer says it's the safest product ever devised and you suspect that it's full of holes you aren't allowed to look. If they say it has technology developed by NASA and you suspect code looted from a GPL'd product - you can't check - it's illegal.
If I'm doing a term paper on the effectiveness and accuracy of "filters" and I can't test the product, or publish my findings, how do I progress. When someone else is doing a study on the long term effects of filtering (i.e. what knowledge was lost/missed due to improper filtering) how can one do so without looking at how and what the filters filtered.
Look at some EULA's lately. One EULA I got a couple of years ago said that "reviews can only be published after the written consent of 'COMPANYX'. COMPANYX reserves the right to sole editorship of any published reviews of it's products." This meant that ANY review that you saw on the web or in a magazine they effectively wrote. The problem was trying to find any real data on the product - every review was glowing, no problems, no benchmarks, and no real information.
At the end of the day the product was a piece of crap. But the only way you could find out it was a piece of crap was by purchasing a license at 700+ per seat and doing your own testing. Which the company assured wouldn't be accurate without having a "production" environment to test against.
More and more companies are hiding behind their EULA's, patent law, trademark law, copyright law, and so called "trade secrets" to hide the fact that their products are not of the quality nor even contain the feature sets that they advertise. And the judges and the politicians give them more and more room to maneuver every day. Filtering companies claim "Advanced Artificial Intelligence" and "Intelligent Algorithms" and we can't tell that they aren't just using a handcompiled blacklist updated regularly. And these are the companies that the politicians want EVERY LIBRARY and EVERY SCHOOL SYSTEM to use for filtering. I don't reallistically think that the government is going to make the effort to keep these vendors honest so I think WE should have the ability to do so. The only way to do that is through some ability to reverse engineer their products.
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, this type of thing has already been ruled unconstitutional [techdirt.com] in New York at least, thanks to the New York Attorney General:
(As a side note, I believe this is the way the First Amendment is stretched to include private contracts: It says "Congress shall pass no law..." but copyright law is also a federal law, and therefore copyright law cannot be construed as prohibiting free speech other than speech with which it is directly concerned, i.e. copying of other people's work.)Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that when they sell those products in a retail marketplace, they no longer can reasonably expect to maintain any secrets those products may contain, especially in light of the fact that there is no contract binding the customer to keep those secrets. Companies examine their competitors' products all the time. You think Sony just sits there contemplating its navel? No, they're out there buying their competitors' products, tearing them apart, and u
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course a company is entitled to keep their trade secrets secret, if they can. What's at issue is: Should they be allowed to finesse the government into making it illegal for anyone else to discover those secrets via reverse engineering?
Copyright was never meant to be a way to prevent people from learning secrets. It was meant to prevent people from re
why make a choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every company is entitled to keep trade secrets. It either that or they must patent their inventions. Patents require disclosure.
Yes patents require disclosure in return for Federal protection of the exlusive use of the thing described. They are very expensive for a company and they give away all your hard work so that others can use it.
Now, thanks to the DMCA, you don't have to chose. Neat eh? You can have your trade secrets published publically in an encrypted form and the US Government will make sure others don't tell anyone about how it works even when they are bright enough to figure it out. They will protect your feble trade secrets from "invasion"! This is really cool, now no one has to tell anyone anything AND be protected by the government. What a great trade! I pay taxes which are used to keep me from understanding the things I own.
Well, I used to own things. Now that I can't do what I want with them or share what I do with my friends, I think some of my things belong to the people who made it. Just imagine this being applied to software! Oh wait, this is software! Really really neat. If I install that program on my computer so that I'm not tempted to look at things someone else thinks are nasty, I'm not only giving up my right to read, I'm giving up ownership of my computer! That's just unbelievable. Next thing you know, you won't be able to share what you know about BIOS [slashdot.org]. Well, it's good that other people are willing to be responsible for the things I want to use. That way I don't have to worry when they break [slashdot.org]. Someone will always take care of me.
Re:Holy crap the end is near (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as they don't publish or make them generally available - then the law doesn't (or shouldn't) protect you if someone out there discovers the secret and tells the world about it.
It is not illegal to appropriate someone elses trade secrets, it is only illegal if you misappropriate the trade secret.
To quote:
"Misappropriation " means: (i) acquisition of a trade secret of another by a person who knows or has reason to know that the trade secret was acq
Sort of off topic but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can write the "Hello World" program a million different ways - so can you write a program to do the same thing that one program does if you do it from scratch? Think back to your programming classes - the professor gave you a task, you did it, but the chances of it being exactly the same as the person's sitting next to you was nill to none unless you were just copying their work.
Reverse Engineering is NOT Necessarily Decryption (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely this ruling prohibits these 'tools' also! Reverse Engineering is a broad brush encompassing everything from black-box analysis to black-hat decryption.
I'd be interested in seeing the 'tools' suggested by the defense as they must clearly not be covered under the DMCA. Would an NP complete brute force approach be considered a violation under the DMCA or simply 'fair use'?
Re:Reverse Engineering is NOT Necessarily Decrypti (Score:4, Informative)
Oh great. (Score:3, Funny)
...oh..umm...
Too late, huh?
Welcome to DMCA land! (Score:2, Interesting)
how about the right of consumers to know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is my beef. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a serious problem, maybe it's not with n2h2, but the fact that governement is using software to protect it's citizens completly blind. Sure it sounds all peachy, but cmon, if you're gonna block people off, make sure you know what is being blocked, don't give a company like n2h2 the playground.
There are plenty of open source alternatives anyway, where you can manually control the blocked list, who is doing for the "consulting" for the governement, most likely someone who wants to keep his job. (prolonging the problem brings in more money)
This is bad both ways, gov wants to use proprietary over open source, and gov dosen't care that they can't control which sites are blocked and which aren't.
To be honest, that list should be public to the community, and sites should be debated by a community coucil for their library, to decide which should be allowed by standards in the area, no main entity is the know it all genie of what is right for everyone.
Re:Here is my beef. (Score:2)
We use N2H2 here at a public school. If something is being blocked without merit, I manually put it into another filter that is unblocked. How is that giving N2H2 the power to censor the internet? Am I one of those evil people in the government that is keeping information from the people?
Initially, the pricipals from all the schools in our district came up with a
Re:Here is my beef. (Score:3, Insightful)
If your office has all their documents in excell and word how can openoffice work if its illegal to read these file formats. After all Microsoft lawyers can now use this case to equal reverse engineering= tresspasing.
Sigh.
SCO can now sue Linus and redhat as well. They reversed Unix to make Linux unix compatible in regards to SysV. Now Its payback.
Already Exempt (Score:5, Informative)
While the judge's reasoning in this case appears to be wrong, the outcome of the his decision is correct. Part of the anti-circumvention clause states that the Copyright Office was to hold hearings to decide on specific classes of work that should be exempt. They only picked two, which were:
In other words, what the plaintiff wanted to do is not illegal, so he has no standing to challenge the law. You can read about it here [copyright.gov]. FWIW, that may not be true for long. The Copyright Office is holding another round of hearings [copyright.gov], and one of the scheduled topics is whether this exemption should be continued.
um ... (Score:5, Informative)
N2H2 claimed that providing such information to Edelman would compromise trade secrets, and that Edelman had no legal standing to be granted such permission because there was no imminent threat he would be sued.
Maybe they should have picked a more suitable case to file their lawsuit?
Re:um ... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's sad that he was denied permission, after all how many hackers acually take the time and trouble to request permission before a judge? He should have gotten permission for the effort!
The encrypted protocol? I have it right here... (Score:5, Funny)
and I can post it on Slashdot right now,
right after I answer the knock at the door...
Cheers, Joel
2 big problems.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now supposedly the judge says that this list of blocked sites is copyrighted. Excuse me but I'm totally baffled as to how a 3rd party company has copyright on a list that contains domain names that belong to a 4th party. I really need someone to explain this. Does merely making a list of otherwise publicly available information make it copyrightable? Does the mere listing make it something new and special?
The second big problem here seem to go against (IIRC) previous case law on reverse engineering. If this ruling stands you might as well kiss RE good bye. Every company is the US is gonna whine DMCA and "invasive and destructive trespass".
Why do I hear a huge sucking sound?
Re:2 big problems.. (Score:2, Informative)
In short, yes. IIRC, telephone directories are the common example of this.
-jerdenn
Re:2 big problems.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:2 big problems.. (Score:4, Informative)
prizog in a sibling post posted a link to the case that determined that, so I won't bother, but it's worth pointing out that to the best of my knowlege, the phone book, considered as a list of names and phone numbers, is the only thing to ever fail the creativity criterion, so jerdenn's post is otherwise correct.
Also note this does not mean "the phone book" is not under copyright; the part that has advertisements would probably be considered a creative work for the layout, and of course the advertisements themselves are copyrighted. All that was found to not be protected was the residential names and numbers, in alphabetical order.
Re:2 big problems.. (Score:2)
Re:2 big problems.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a little bit confused on this as well.
First, I think the 'copyright' here is actually not too far off the base from Google's PageRank technology.
I think the company's fears (which at least makes sense, even if they are ridiculous) that if they gave a complete list of their blocked sites, their algorit
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Supreme Court Appeal Will Create Publicity (Score:2)
More specifically as regards N2H2, if the inherent security of an application can be compromised by reverse-engineering, then it isn't truly s
Poor test of DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
People like Edelman need to realize that the filtering companies are doing nothing but building products to meet a demand in the market place. If they are actually concered about cencorship, they need to focus on regulating the implementation of these products by public organizations. As for businesses, they are free to censor all they want.
constitutional interest? (Score:5, Insightful)
no constitutional interest eh?
Edelman had asked a Seattle company called N2H2 for a list of sites its software blocks, but was rebuffed.
"It's highly desirable that these products are accurate, that when they say they're blocking pornography, they're really blocking pornography, not people running for Congress who talk about the evils of pornography," he said Wednesday. "Yet the research to date indicates they make a lot of mistakes."
Hrm... I'm not completely familiar with the American constitution but I was under the impression that Freedom of speech and by implication the right to discover what speech you were being denied access to would outweigh the right to protect copyrighted material. Oh and BTW how does finding the list constitute an invasive and destructive trespass.? Yes it could hurt them if competitors used their list in their own products (after all the accuracy of such a list would be the essential element of their system) but I hardly feel it would be destructive in any way. Is the judge just refering to economic damage or is there some other potentiaal cause for damage?
Re:constitutional interest? (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole concept of copyrights (as well as patents) was invented so that people would not keep their works secret. It was invented solely to encourage people to publish their work.
Obviously, when the U.S. Constititution was written, nobody expected or imagined that any copyrighted work could be obfuscated or encrypted. The technology didn't exist at the time. Copyright was invented to encourage the publication of pl
Broad implications? (Score:2, Insightful)
Court ruled correctly (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when do people get to use the court as a pre-emptive strike against prosecution from future actions? If cases like this were allowed, the courts would be full of nothing but cases of people seeking legal protection for their future acts. The ACLU is just making shit up again, as usual.
If this guy had any balls, he would violate the DMCA in a public forum, and then dare someone to charge/sue him.
Bess filtering software (Score:2, Interesting)
Directed anger... (Score:2, Interesting)
They way I see it there are only two ways about it. Either the organization can filter whatever they want because it's their own service and they aren't bound by law to make that service public, or they can only filter what's legal to filter... find one thing that's not, and yo
Re:Directed anger... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not surprising. (Score:2)
READ THE FREAKING OPINION!!!!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:READ THE FREAKING OPINION!!!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:READ THE FREAKING OPINION!!!!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
DMCA Allows This (Score:4, Insightful)
-Waldo Jaquith
Contrast this with patents (Score:3, Interesting)
While many
This opinion says nothing about DCMA (Score:5, Informative)
Judge Richard Stearns and Bill Clinton (Score:3, Informative)
I don't buy the CIA connection theory, nor would I necessarily consider it to be a bad thing if it were true. It's just the connection with former president Bill Clinton that I find helpful in looking into who Judge Richard Stearns is.
Might as well move to Iraq (Score:3, Insightful)
StarTux
Stop, Read, and Relax (Score:5, Insightful)
Thalia
Invasive and Destructive Trespass (Score:3, Insightful)
RTFO -- this isn't what it seems (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the judge's opinion [harvard.edu] before leaping to conclusions. This is NOT a case that was decided on the merits of an underying DMCA claim.
The plaintiff in this case was not N2H2, but rather the fellow who wanted to do his reverse engineering. He sued under a theory of equity, seeking what is called a declaratory judgment. Before even reaching the question about whether the plaintiff is entitled to act, the Court must first address whether or not it has jurisdiction.
This isn't a light issue -- the Federal Courts only have jurisdiction over ACTUAL "cases and controversies." This is a constitutional limitation. The federal judiciary does not offer what is called "advisory" opinions -- ever.
Here, without touching on the DMCA issue at any level, the Court simply ruled that our erstwhile declaratory judgment plaintiff didn't have the standing to drag D2H2 to court. I agree with others here that the reasoning for no standing was not the Court's strongest argument, but in view of the Copyright Office excemption, this case just doesn't hold water on the standing question.
What he should have done (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, to do this his program needs to interoperate with N2H2's software. Hello DMCA exception:
In addition to its main function, the program also happens to identify sites that shouldn't have been blocked.
Keep pounding... I think we'll need more hammers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honest question here (Score:3, Insightful)
It DOESN'T mean THAT! (Score:5, Interesting)
This ruling does not even reach the merits of the DMCA or reverse engineering. It is concerned with a legal doctrine called standing. The law of standing in Federal Courts means that you must be a proper person to bring a claim. Article III of the US Constitution requires that there be an ACTUAL "case or controversy" for a court to hear. The US federal courts decide cases. The courts do NOT give advisory opinions - e.g., if you do this you will (not) be breaking the law.
The plaintiff here was a Harvard Law Student who asked the court to declare that IF he reverse-engineered the software THEN he would not be breaking the law - essentially asking for advice that the federal courts will not give.
The federal Declaratory Judgment Act allows federal courts to "declare" the rights of the parties, but that is different from giving advice. There still must be an actual case or controversy. To show that, the plaintiff must show that he has a "reasonable apprehension" of being sued. Usually that is done by showing the court some communication between the parties in which one party has either explicitly threatened a lawsuit or because of the relationship between the parties it is obvious that a suit is coming. Here, the law student could not show that, so he lacks standing to bring this suit.
If you doubt the correctness of my statements, look to the key part of Judge Stearns's quote: "there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman [the plaintiff law student] can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material...." He can't assert the rights he is trying to assert. In other words, you aren't the right person to bring this claim, you have no reasonable apprehension of actually being sued by these guys, you are merely asking for advice, we don't do that here, get out of my court but feel free to come back if you actually go ahead and reverse-engineer and you are threatened with a lawsuit.
Re:Does this leave IBM free... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Preemptive legal action (Score:3, Insightful)
If a nation can perform a military preemptive attack with no proofs beyond reasonable doubt and expect the world to accept it, then why should a judge of this very same nation refuse to accept preemptive lawsuits without proofs ?