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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."
and its so freaking intrusive. it once banned slashdot for "vulgar language" (how often do you see that on /.?
btw, fp!
Write to your elected representatives. Do it now.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
If this stands up, it will be a kick in the teeth to freedom. A free society depends on public disclosure and peer-review. It's sickening to see how so many laws are being aimed at those two targets these days.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
If a product is really doing what it says it's doing? If it has an accurate method for filtering out what is pornography from what isn't? If the people writing the program used proper definitions of pornography when deciding what should be filtered? What the court has done is grant this company impermeability to review or criticism.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
There is a serious problem, maybe it's not with n2h2, but the fact that governement is using software to protect it's citizens completly blind. Sure it sounds all peachy, but cmon, if you're gonna block people off, make sure you know what is being blocked, don't give a company like n2h2 the playground.
There are plenty of open source alternatives anyway, where you can manually control the blocked list, who is doing for the "consulting" for the governement, most likely someone who wants to keep his job. (prolonging the problem brings in more money)
This is bad both ways, gov wants to use proprietary over open source, and gov dosen't care that they can't control which sites are blocked and which aren't.
To be honest, that list should be public to the community, and sites should be debated by a community coucil for their library, to decide which should be allowed by standards in the area, no main entity is the know it all genie of what is right for everyone.
Posting useless rant since 2003.
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:
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.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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?
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
and I can post it on Slashdot right now,
right after I answer the knock at the door...
Cheers, Joel
he first one relates to the article "Edelman had asked a Seattle company called N2H2 for a list of sites its software blocks, but was rebuffed."
Now supposedly the judge says that this list of blocked sites is copyrighted. Excuse me but I'm totally baffled as to how a 3rd party company has copyright on a list that contains domain names that belong to a 4th party. I really need someone to explain this. Does merely making a list of otherwise publicly available information make it copyrightable? Does the mere listing make it something new and special?
The second big problem here seem to go against (IIRC) previous case law on reverse engineering. If this ruling stands you might as well kiss RE good bye. Every company is the US is gonna whine DMCA and "invasive and destructive trespass".
Why do I hear a huge sucking sound?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
This case was a poor choice for the ACLU to cahllenge the DMCA on. Edelman was clearly trying to grind his ax against a web site filtering company. The ACLU needs to find a single issue case to pursue. I think the guy who is being sent to jail for selling XBox mod chips would be a good case to challenge the DMCA on.
People like Edelman need to realize that the filtering companies are doing nothing but building products to meet a demand in the market place. If they are actually concered about cencorship, they need to focus on regulating the implementation of these products by public organizations. As for businesses, they are free to censor all they want.
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.
...
no constitutional interest eh?
Edelman had asked a Seattle company called N2H2 for a list of sites its software blocks, but was rebuffed.
"It's highly desirable that these products are accurate, that when they say they're blocking pornography, they're really blocking pornography, not people running for Congress who talk about the evils of pornography," he said Wednesday. "Yet the research to date indicates they make a lot of mistakes."
Hrm... I'm not completely familiar with the American constitution but I was under the impression that Freedom of speech and by implication the right to discover what speech you were being denied access to would outweigh the right to protect copyrighted material. Oh and BTW how does finding the list constitute an invasive and destructive trespass.? Yes it could hurt them if competitors used their list in their own products (after all the accuracy of such a list would be the essential element of their system) but I hardly feel it would be destructive in any way. Is the judge just refering to economic damage or is there some other potentiaal cause for damage?
I stole this Sig
I'll leave this to the lawyers, but consider this. If reverse engineering is not a valid means to an end, where does this leave any preexisting incidents? Does IBM now have a valid case against anybody and everybody using the bios that was reverse engineered from the original IBM PC? Or maybe I'm off base, can somebody shed some insight?
My school employs N2H2's filtering software. I find it to be rather intrusive and annoying when I'm researching (or simply surfing the internet). In N2H2's defense, writing an intelligent filter that will not make any mistakes is close to impossible. I mean - think of what you're asking! A filter that will make near-human decisions based on a site's content/url... I'd like to see you write one. It would be impossible to manually screen each and every page on the internet each and every time they were updated, which would be the only sure-fire way to keep good pages from getting blocked. However, I am of the opinion that N2H2's filtering software Bess could be a little more effective. It does block rediculous pages at times...
Oh well. Until the software gets better, I'll just continue to write scripts to get past the filters =P
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Why aren't we attacking the organizations that use this filtering software instead of attacking the program itself? Wouldn't finding ONE site that shouldn't be filtered be good enough to prove that illegal censorship is in effect?
They way I see it there are only two ways about it. Either the organization can filter whatever they want because it's their own service and they aren't bound by law to make that service public, or they can only filter what's legal to filter... find one thing that's not, and you've got a pretty strong argument to force the organization to abandon the filter.
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.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
-Waldo Jaquith
The problem with this is clearly that companies are now using the DMCA to protect trade secrets. This sort of strengthening of the ability of companies to keep technology secret has the potential to have very dire consequences to innovation. Why wouldn't the next step be for Microsoft to use DMCA to squash reverse engineering of a file format or network protocol?
/. readers dislike patents, at least with this as the primary mechanism to protect IP you have time limits, disclosure of the technology and some sort of review to determine if the technology is worthy of a protected status. Patents have to be greatly preferred over the DMCA.
While many
The judge ruled that he had no standing. This is not saying that reverse engineering is bad.
/. thinks its reporting is "fair and balanced" ala Fox News.
This is saying that the plaintiff did not meet the test for standing.
What does this mean? It means that Slashdot is not actually "News for nerds." It's propaganda for a hostile community. I'm sure that
In reality these inflammatory headlines actually dilute the true story and really don't help our community. It makes us look reactionary. Maybe we should be proposing workable solutions instead of posting stories that reduce the credibility of this website, and nerds all over the world. Stop serving as a mouthpiece for a select few and start working towards something positive!
-Tom the Angry Nerd.
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.
I don't buy the CIA connection theory, nor would I necessarily consider it to be a bad thing if it were true. It's just the connection with former president Bill Clinton that I find helpful in looking into who Judge Richard Stearns is.
Funny.. every copyright extension in the past 30 years had been retroactive, placing existing works in the umbrella of a new law. Even that is gone.
jello.
aka aron.
FWIW, for you people with minds in the gutter, my employer's new firewall is configured in a screwy way that was preventing me from posting to Slashdot (apparently this was not intentional; I have a (low-priority) help ticket open to get it fixed). You can see details in my log; apparently there's a Slashdot FAQ about this.
Anyways, the point is, by connecting to Slashdot thru Anonymizer's proxy, I get around my employer's firewall issue. The same logic holds for people behind N2H2's Bess or other similar "blockers".
Part of the Second American Revolution!
uses a filtering "service" that's always down. The NT4 proxy servers only resolve an ip correctly two tries out of three.
It's not too bad, because they have an 802.11b net my Zaurus and iBook can access as well as a "secret router" on 10.0.0.3 that I'm not supposed to know about.
BTW, the NT4 proxy is sp2; I made a single URL that can crash the proxy if entered on any school computer. They really should fire the techies and let me do the job for a gym credit.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Sure enough, I can now play flash flash revolution during those boring high school comp science classes.
Huh? They let you hook headphones and a 3 by 3 foot DANCE PAD up to their computers and jump around on it during class? At my school, I could only connect a dance pad to an institute-owned machine during meetings of DDR club.
If you're going to dance with your fingers on the keyboard, you might as well play Konami's official version of DDR on a Game Boy Color system.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just so you know, you don't need a PAC to lobby your own congresscritter. Many congresscritters are happy to hear from their constituents, and really give some consideration to what they have to say. Sadly, senators often have a much less substantial relation to their constituents.
Also, even without cash (well, other than to buy stamps and paper, or to pay the phone bill), you can get involved. A congressman almost always has a local office in their district that they visit, for at least a few weeks while Congress is not in session. You might want to talk to his staff about getting some time to visit and talk directly while your representative is in town. If you get access, do your homework ahead of time and bring copies of supporting documents that you can give (executive summaries are nice too here).
You can also offer time. If your congresscritter is doing a good job, volunteer to help on their campaign. If your congresscritter is doing a bad job, look over there opposition and see if there's someone there you'd like to help out instead. Nothing modifies a congresscritter's opinion faster than popular support for an opponent with a contrary opinion. If you hate all of these bozos, consider running yourself.
Basically, the more involved and visible you are (in a friendly, non-wacko, non-stalker sort of way), the more likely the congresscritter is to give credibility to your opinion. Involved people don't just vote, they influence other peoples' votes, and that means a lot to someone who is up for reelection every two years.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Every company is entitled to keep trade secrets. It either that or they must patent their inventions. Patents require disclosure.
Yes patents require disclosure in return for Federal protection of the exlusive use of the thing described. They are very expensive for a company and they give away all your hard work so that others can use it.
Now, thanks to the DMCA, you don't have to chose. Neat eh? You can have your trade secrets published publically in an encrypted form and the US Government will make sure others don't tell anyone about how it works even when they are bright enough to figure it out. They will protect your feble trade secrets from "invasion"! This is really cool, now no one has to tell anyone anything AND be protected by the government. What a great trade! I pay taxes which are used to keep me from understanding the things I own.
Well, I used to own things. Now that I can't do what I want with them or share what I do with my friends, I think some of my things belong to the people who made it. Just imagine this being applied to software! Oh wait, this is software! Really really neat. If I install that program on my computer so that I'm not tempted to look at things someone else thinks are nasty, I'm not only giving up my right to read, I'm giving up ownership of my computer! That's just unbelievable. Next thing you know, you won't be able to share what you know about BIOS. Well, it's good that other people are willing to be responsible for the things I want to use. That way I don't have to worry when they break. Someone will always take care of me.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
While I certainly agree that the last presidential election had problems, your analysis of the problems could use a little help.
Our popular vote is deliberately irrelevant for the presidential election; this is to prevent a few populous states from running off with the election. Hypothetical situation: the electoral college is thrown out, and two candidates are running for the popular vote in an election. Candidate A has run a very tightly targetted (read: lots of gifts and pork to specific locations) campaign of promises to key population centers, and has almost 100% of the vote in California, Texas and New York, but has only about 40% of the vote in every other state. Even though 47 out of 50 states prefer B, A has a significant chance of winning. This is why we use the electoral college rather than popular vote. If you don't like it, changing the rule requires a constitutional amendment, by all means work towards getting it, many people agree with you.
The Governor of Florida has no obligation to pay attention to the popular vote of the nation, or even Florida (except during his own election, of course). The Governor of Florida is responsible for executing the laws passed by the Florida State Legislature to regulate operation of the election. There are those who allege that he did not do this, that he bent (or allowed his staff and allies to bend) these laws to benefit his brother at the expense of the Gore campaign. Any evidence along these lines is sparse, and it is doubtful that it will ever be proven one way or the other.
The "confusion of the divits" was tragic, and underscored the need of Florida (and most other states for that matter) to reevaluate the systems they use for voting. Many countries do fine just marking an X on a piece of paper and hand counting the pieces of paper. Some countries have interesting higher tech ideas that may be worth considering. Regardless of what gets chosen, it's clear that using a stylus to punch holes in a piece of paper leaves a lot of room for confusion, for not having a clear understanding of the intent of the voter. Minimizing this confusion in the future is very important.
The amount of time they spent investigating was not wasted time IMHO. The amount of time they spent bickering about how to investigate was, and I considered both candidates responsible for that.
Incidentally, are you aware that, in 2001, a group of news agencies carefully examined all the "rejected" ballots in Florida and determined that: A) if Gore had successfully received the partial recount he had requested, he still would have lost; and B) if Bush received the statewide recount that he halfheartedly countersuggested, Gore probably would have won.
So, yes, I consider Bush to be an illegitimate president, simply because a thorough recount indicates that Gore won Florida, and therefore won the election. I don't blame any "ignoring" of the popular vote for the wrong person being in the White House, or any alleged corruption by Bush's brother or campaign manager. I blame simply the sorry state of our voting systems in this country, and the inadequate set of laws governing recounts in the state of Florida.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
As they may get some form of Democracy....Its sad that whilst we fight for "Freedom" in other countries the US internally is becoming more like the monster it is trying to fight.
StarTux
The Court actually simply decided that there was no case in controversy. Edelman sued, before he did anything for a declaratory judgement giving him permission to reverse engineer. The court said they wouldn't decide the case, because it's not sure that N2H2 would sue, or that Edelman would do anything. The only time a court will make a decision if nothing has happened yet (like here, about future potential lawsuits) is if a fundamental right is at question. While copyright Fair Use is important, it is clearly not a fundamental right. So, chill. And wait for someone to actually be sued under the DMCA for reverse engineering for research purposes. If the Court then holds that there is no right to reverse engineer anymore (in spite of Sega v. Accolade.
Thalia
If it were either invasive or destructive I'd have more respect for this Judge and his ruling. Despite arguments to the contrary, altering the flow of bits through a computer that you own doesn't invade anyone, and the notion that bits can be destroyed is laughable. The Judge needs to reissue his ruling without resorting to terms don't mean squat in the virtual world.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
It is so important in these uncertain times that we focus our vitreol on case where there is actual legislative or judicial overreaching.
Read the judge's opinion before leaping to conclusions. This is NOT a case that was decided on the merits of an underying DMCA claim.
The plaintiff in this case was not N2H2, but rather the fellow who wanted to do his reverse engineering. He sued under a theory of equity, seeking what is called a declaratory judgment. Before even reaching the question about whether the plaintiff is entitled to act, the Court must first address whether or not it has jurisdiction.
This isn't a light issue -- the Federal Courts only have jurisdiction over ACTUAL "cases and controversies." This is a constitutional limitation. The federal judiciary does not offer what is called "advisory" opinions -- ever.
Here, without touching on the DMCA issue at any level, the Court simply ruled that our erstwhile declaratory judgment plaintiff didn't have the standing to drag D2H2 to court. I agree with others here that the reasoning for no standing was not the Court's strongest argument, but in view of the Copyright Office excemption, this case just doesn't hold water on the standing question.
A judge, as in this case, is not likely to accept preemptive lawsuits because all he can claim is he wouldn't use them
If a nation can perform a military preemptive attack with no proofs beyond reasonable doubt and expect the world to accept it, then why should a judge of this very same nation refuse to accept preemptive lawsuits without proofs ?
C:\> ren dwi2.exe notepad.exe
Get your own free personal location tracker
Aah, reminds me of my living in the dorms at college. A couple of years ago I attended the University of Oregon. Back then it was ranked one of the most wired campuses in the nation...
Dual T-3 connections for the entire campus and dorms, each student had his own 10 Mbit ethernet jack in his dorm room, and you could actually utilize the full bandwidth! I loved serving up my IRC fserver full of anime on a nice fat pipe - uploaded approx. 150 GB/week of anime.
I will never forget the day my internet connection was shut off when they blocked my MAC address. Quick trip down to the "appropriate use" offices of the network admins office that day.
They asked me about my running a server in my room - since school policy didn't forbid it, I readily admitted I was hosting video files. The guy I was talking to then mentioned they had several calls from SONY and the MPAA about "someone running a server with video files," but I quickly added that they were not distributed in the US, and I hoped they weren't copyrighted here.
At that point the guy got really interested, and asked me what anime I had up on it and if I wanted to trade...school policy pretty much went out the window there.
But I got the "7th highest bandwidth user on campus award," nearly beating out the mail server! Aaah, I love the 500kBytes/sec days!
(you guys with your own personal T-3's and such can just stop laughing in the background)
Of course, to do this his program needs to interoperate with N2H2's software. Hello DMCA exception:
In addition to its main function, the program also happens to identify sites that shouldn't have been blocked.
The judge somehow figured out what has been happening in a case? Sounds like a bit of non-technical reverse engineering to me.
VBA:)! Add a VBA sciplet to your word document, and then do Shell "." If you email me, i have a dialect program, that edits some key registry enties for running programs and so on. Then you crash explorer (with ctrl+Ald+del) and you have bascially full access.
The DMCA is continually pounding more nails in the coffin of American ingenuity and relevance in the high-tech sector. Until America wakes up and realizes that the proper way to grow both business and society is without laws granting broad protection for "intellectual property". America is already falling behind in the technical arena to other countries with more permissive laws about reverse engineering. Companies should be held to the same scrutiny that research is held to in matters of security, which means full access to the source and algorithms. As a company I would welcome such peer review. Copyrights should be enough to prevent my competitors from "stealing" my secrets. I would also be wary of using any company's products that actively prevents people from putting my product through such peer reviews.
Guess that blows many recipe sites, I guess the 'Beef' producers lobbied for that one, cant have terrorist chicken breast recipes floating out there in cyberspace now can we..
But in all seriousness, it shows how bad of an idea these sort of 'filters' are.. they are flawed by design, and prone to 'political' abuse.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Isn't copyright law intended to protect *published* works? If I made my own internet filter software (why would I want to? I don't know...) and my banned list ended up the same as theirs, could they nail me for copyright infringement? Isn't this more of a trade secret than a copyright?
do not read this line twice.
This ruling does not even reach the merits of the DMCA or reverse engineering. It is concerned with a legal doctrine called standing. The law of standing in Federal Courts means that you must be a proper person to bring a claim. Article III of the US Constitution requires that there be an ACTUAL "case or controversy" for a court to hear. The US federal courts decide cases. The courts do NOT give advisory opinions - e.g., if you do this you will (not) be breaking the law.
The plaintiff here was a Harvard Law Student who asked the court to declare that IF he reverse-engineered the software THEN he would not be breaking the law - essentially asking for advice that the federal courts will not give.
The federal Declaratory Judgment Act allows federal courts to "declare" the rights of the parties, but that is different from giving advice. There still must be an actual case or controversy. To show that, the plaintiff must show that he has a "reasonable apprehension" of being sued. Usually that is done by showing the court some communication between the parties in which one party has either explicitly threatened a lawsuit or because of the relationship between the parties it is obvious that a suit is coming. Here, the law student could not show that, so he lacks standing to bring this suit.
If you doubt the correctness of my statements, look to the key part of Judge Stearns's quote: "there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman [the plaintiff law student] can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material...." He can't assert the rights he is trying to assert. In other words, you aren't the right person to bring this claim, you have no reasonable apprehension of actually being sued by these guys, you are merely asking for advice, we don't do that here, get out of my court but feel free to come back if you actually go ahead and reverse-engineer and you are threatened with a lawsuit.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.