A federal judge in Boston has thrown out a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The ACLU filed the suit last July on behalf of Ben Edelman, a 22-year-old computer expert and consultant at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who contends that the DMCA’s stringent digital-copyright provisions stymied his research into how Internet filter-maker N2H2 compiles its list of blocked sites.
“There is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that . . . outweighs N2H2’s right to protect its copyrighted property from an invasive and destructive trespass,” wrote U.S. District Judge Richard Sterns. The CNet online news service also reported that because the possibility of legal action from N2H2 was only speculative, Sterns said the lawsuit was premature.
“We think that researchers and other people who want to learn about filters already have means for doing that,” N2H2 spokesman David Burt told the Associated Press. “I think it’s pretty clear that people who want to analyze and criticize filters can use tools that do not involve decryption.”
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 last May. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the case March 5.
Posted April 14, 2003.