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Digital
Law Suits – Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
 The
US senate passed the controversial copyright law known as Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the year 1998. The validity of the
Act has been challenged several times in the court of law and the law
has been amended time and over to meet the newer challenges.
One of such challenges was brought about by the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) which sought to overturn some of the key parts
of the controversial law. The suit challenged the provisions of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which were extremely wide and
sweeping that they interfered with the ability of a researcher to
evaluate the effectiveness and degree of accuracy of internet filters.
The ACLU initiated the suit on behalf of a 22 year old researcher
programmer who primarily researched on buggy software products. The
ACLU aimed at getting a positive ruling to curtail the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act’s widespread reach. The Digital
Millennium Copyright Act has become a target of criticism after it had
been used for intimidating Professor Ed Felton of Princeton University
and his colleagues to adopt self imposed censorship. Until now each and
every judge has upheld the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s
wide restrictions only on cased which tried to circumvent copyright
protection or infringement of Intellectual Property Rights of Software
companies.
However the ACLU thought the their case would be taken up under
different light as it involve critiquing software in the over all
benefit of the society which is frequently use by public libraries and
schools. In the case the plaintiff Ben Edelman, testified in the
capacity of an expert that the ACLU had brought the case against a law
which was forcing public schools and libraries to install internet
filters.
Edelman was one of the brains working behind the preparation of the law
suit against Children’s Internet Protection Act and was an
interested party in the software an to make his research better he
needed access to the entire list of the blocked sites. He stumbled upon
the fact that the all the filtering software maintained a blacklist of
blocked sites in an encrypted database and no single software was
perfect. Any means and ways of decrypting encrypted list would mean
going against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and inviting digital
law suits under the act. Edelman in is reports stated that he had
discovered how 4425 domains pointed to a single pornographic website
and also a report which pointed out gross errors in the whois database.
A long shot; Legal eagles respected and applauded the ACLU for its case
but thought that it was a long shot to succeed by any means. The
thought that ACLU were demanding too much for Edelman to have permanent
immunity form law suits for copy right, breach trade secrets and other
protective acts. The ACLU sought to get the courts permission to allow
Edelman to decrypt the encrypted blacklists, distribute the blacklists
in public and along with a decrypting utility.
However, all lawsuits challenging the validity of Digital Millennium
Copyright Act have failed. The most publicized case was that of the
DeCSS utility for decrypting DVDs.
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