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Federal Judge Rules Against Reverse-engineering

Posted by chrisd on from the freedoms-going-going-gone dept.

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."

2 of 477 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Holy crap the end is near by pauljlucas · · Score: 0, Troll
    Coca-Cola has no grounds for filing a lawsuit against you if you...
    Irrelevant to my point. My very narrow point was in direct rebuttal to the erroneous statement that a company can't expect to sell something publicly and keep something secret. That's all. Any other inferences you draw from my statement are entirely your doing.
    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  2. Re:Holy crap the end is near by Planesdragon · · Score: 0, Troll

    Now you can't own the product. It's not yours. Not only is it not yours but you can't tinker with it. Tinkering with it is illegal. If the manufacturer says it's the safest product ever devised and you suspect that it's full of holes you aren't allowed to look.

    Bullocks. You can tinker with it all you want and even dislcose what you find--but if your "tinkering" is "how do I get this box to do something it was never meant to do" and by "disclose" you mean "tell everyone how to do exactly what you did, which just happens to defeat the copy-protection measures in this thing", then you're guilty of two crimes: one very horrible count of doublespeak, and one clear-cut violation of the DMCA.

    Look at some EULA's lately. One EULA I got a couple of years ago said that "reviews can only be published after the written consent of 'COMPANYX'. COMPANYX reserves the right to sole editorship of any published reviews of it's products." This meant that ANY review that you saw on the web or in a magazine they effectively wrote. The problem was trying to find any real data on the product - every review was glowing, no problems, no benchmarks, and no real information.

    Pay for the license, review it, and call it like you see it. If the company has the cojones to take you to court, you might just get their EULA tossed out on its ear.

    I'll even send you $10 if you do it.

    If they say it has technology developed by NASA and you suspect code looted from a GPL'd product - you can't check - it's illegal.