The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit July 25 that challenges the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Plaintiff Ben Edelman, a 22-year-old computer expert and consultant at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, contends that the DMCA’s stringent digital-copyright provisions stymied his research into how Internet filter-maker N2H2 compiles its list of blocked sites. “I don’t want to go to jail. I want to go to law school,” he told the July 25 online CNET News Service.
Edelman was conducting the N2H2 research as an expert witness for the ACLU in its combined suit with the American Library Association against the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which was overturned at the federal district court level May 31. The Justice Department decided June 20 to appeal the district-court decision.
The federal suit, filed in Massachusetts as Edelman v. N2H2, Inc., seeks an injunction prohibiting N2H2 from suing Edelman should he decrypt and publish the firm’s blacklist and the decryption program he would use to unlock the blacklist. “People have published examples of wrongfully blocked sites, and we didn’t threaten to sue them over that,” N2H2 spokesperson and former Filtering Facts President David Burt told CNET. “There’s nothing illegal in publishing a list,” he added. However, according to the ACLU, N2H2 threatened a separate legal action against Edelman during the CIPA trial if he disclosed such proprietary information.
The ACLU suit comes shortly before the first criminal trial under DMCA is slated to begin in California on August 26. Russian software firm ElcomSoft faces criminal charges for conspiring to decrypt Adobe’s eBook software.
Posted July 29, 2002.