Federal Judge Rules Against Reverse-engineering

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."

Comments

my school uses that..

[Anonymous Coward]

and its so freaking intrusive. it once banned slashdot for "vulgar language" (how often do you see that on /.?

btw, fp!

Re:my school uses that..

[or_smth]

Just a heads up for everyone:

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..

[doorbot.com]

Isn't the whole point of school (supposedly) to facilitate intellectual conversations.. DISCUSSIONS, which of course is what said "message boards" are for?

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.

Already Exempt

[rgmoore]

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:

1. Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsolescence.
2. Compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications

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. FWIW, that may not be true for long. The Copyright Office is holding another round of hearings, and one of the scheduled topics is whether this exemption should be continued.

um ...

[bryanp]

Did the submitter read the article?

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?

READ THE FREAKING OPINION!!!!!!!

[ajakk]

Am I the only one who actually read the Judge's VERY CORRECT opinion? The case was being brought under Declaratory Judgement, ie. I am suing N2H2 because they are about to sue me. The Judge ruled that there was not any proof that N2H2 was about to sue, so the case was thrown out. This ruling had nothing to due with the validity of the DMCA or the scope of reverse engineering exception.

This opinion says nothing about DCMA

[graybeard]

Read the court documents here. Edelman asked the court to permit him to a) ignore the license which bars reverse engineering, and b) ignore N2H2's copyright by publishing the web sites he discovered. The judge noted that Edelman hasn't actually done anything yet, and declared that the court is not in the business of handing out a "get out of jail free" card in case he ever does his research, and N2H2 seeks relief.

Re:Unsigned apps can't run on some installs

[caluml]

The application "dwi2.exe" could not be opened, because it has not been approved by the system administrator.

C:\> ren dwi2.exe notepad.exe

What he should have done

[Quila]

He should have started writing a program whose purpose was to clean-up N2H2's list, finding blocked sites that are no longer operating, so that he could send a list of dead sites to N2H2 in order to lighten their list.

Of course, to do this his program needs to interoperate with N2H2's software. Hello DMCA exception:

`(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.

In addition to its main function, the program also happens to identify sites that shouldn't have been blocked.