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

Re:my school uses that..

[JessLeah]

Wait, wait, WTF? Since when are/should "message boards" be banned from schools?! Isn't the whole point of school (supposedly) to facilitate intellectual conversations.. DISCUSSIONS, which of course is what said "message boards" are for?

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...