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Court Dismisses Digital Millennium Copyright Case
In November a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) filed by Princeton professor Edward Felten and his research team, who sought to have the law declared unconstitutional and to be granted immunity from prosecution under it. Felten, a professor of computer science, feared that he would be sued for publishing his research under a provision of the law that makes it illegal to distribute decryption technology, which circumvents the encryption technology used to bar people from access to or use of digital information. In this case, Felten’s work pointed out flaws in a technology called a digital watermark, which is used by record companies to prevent people from downloading or distributing copyrighted digital audio content.
In dismissing the suit, the court said that there appeared to be no real dispute between the plaintiffs and the defendants, which included the Justice Department, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and several other organizations, because the plaintiffs had not in fact been sued under the act and because the recording industry group now says it was not its intention to sue.
Felten will not take further legal action, according Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented him. "The court, the government, and the recording industry have said that the DMCA doesn’t apply to scientists working on security issues, and we’re not going to argue with that," Cohn says. "But if other scholars are threatened under the act, we’ll be there. Since the government and industry cannot agree on what the DMCA means, it is not surprising that scientists and researchers are confused and decide not to publish research for fear of prosecution under the DMCA."
The controversy arose when a lawyer from the RIAA wrote to Felten about a paper he was scheduled to present at a conference. The paper described how Felten and other researchers had deciphered watermarks, codes designed to protect digital music from unauthorized copying. In the letter, released by Felten, the lawyer wrote that by making such a presentation the researchers could put themselves at risk of "enforcement actions" under federal law. He urged Felten to "withdraw the paper, . . . assure that it is removed from the workshop distribution materials and destroyed, and avoid a public discussion of confidential information." Felten did withdraw his paper, after which he filed suit.
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