DoJ Supports Dismissal of Felten v. RIAA Case

phalse phace writes: "The EFF is reporting that the Department of Justice has filed a motion to dismiss the pending Felten v. RIAA case because it's "not ripe" and it fails to address serious First Amendment problems. (Yeah, like threatening to sue someone for presenting their research on digital music access-control technologies isn't a serious First Amendment problem.) The preliminary statement of the DoJ's memorandum states: "Plaintiffs have not been prosecuted under the DMCA, nor have they been threatened with such prosecution...""

Comments

A letter from the UN H

[Sara Chan]

The following letter to the editor appears in this weeks edition of The Economist (it's online, but there is a charge):

SIR - You correctly identify one of the key challenges for governments in dealing with the threat of terrorism--how to respond to the terrible crime against humanity committed on September 11th without undermining the very freedoms and liberties that the terrorists sought to destroy ("Liberty v security", September 29th). The attack was against more than just buildings and people. It was an attack against fundamental values that now, more than ever, need to be protected and reinforced.

However, in asserting that civil libertarians need to accept a balance between security and liberty, you underestimate the true balance already built into the human-rights system. The drafters of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and similar provisions in other documents such as the European Convention on Human Rights, may not have anticipated the horrific events of September 11th but they did provide for them. Existing human-rights law addresses the issue of competing values and allows some limitation of certain rights to respond to pressing public or social needs, but not so as to jeopardise the essence of the rights concerned.