August 25, 2001

DIGITAL COPYRIGHT LAW THREATENS CIVIL LIBERTIES

American civil liberties are in sorry shape when a Russian graduate student is thrown into jail here for possessing forbidden knowledge.

The student is Dmitry Sklyarov, who was arrested in July at a computer conference in Las Vegas. He spent three weeks in jail and is now free on bail in San Jose (see freesklyarov.org on the Web).

The forbidden knowledge is how to decode Adobe's e-book format. Knowing that falls foul of provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in Section 1202, that prohibits people from bypassing any technological measure limiting how they use a (digital) copyrighted work, and also bans ``trafficking'' in any kind of technology, product, service or device that would enable them to do it.

If the same kind of provision existed with regard to printed material, it would be illegal to sell photocopiers or cameras or tape recorders because someone might use them to violate copyright.

Sklyarov's case is the focus of an organized protest movement -- at least, as organized as the Internet gets -- but it isn't the only one to highlight the idiocy of the law.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has been following the story of Edward Felten, an associate professor of computer science at Princeton. At a Washington, D.C., conference earlier this month he and his colleagues presented their research on security weaknesses in a ``digital watermark.'' The Verance Corp., who designed the watermark, and the Recording Industry Association of America had threatened him with ``enforcement actions'' if he discussed the work at an April conference. In June, Felten sued the recording industry, asking for immunity from prosecution, and in turn representatives of the industry said they never intended to sue Felten.

The researchers did their work in part because of a challenge issued by the Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation to decipher the encryption code. They waived their rights to prizes in order to be free to publish.

Another case involving DVDs has demonstrated the impossibility of reconciling the Section 1201 ban with First Amendment rights. David Touretzky of the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University tells the story in an article in the August issue of the journal Communications of the ACM.

``The technology that protects DVD movies,'' Touretzky writes, ``is an incompetently designed stream cipher known as Content Scrambling System.''

Movie studios could install a mechanism ``requiring North American DVD players to reject discs intended for European or Asian markets, and vice versa. They could even force viewers to sit through commercials, by locking out the fast-forward function.''

But viewers who did not care for these enhancements were subject to a fine of up to $2,500 for playing their DVDs on an unauthorized machine, and the seller of the machine could go to prison for five years.

When a decryption program called DeCSS began to spread in cyberspace, the studios sued to suppress it. In January 2000, a U.S. district judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, issued an injunction barring distribution of forms of the decryption algorithm that could be compiled and executed by a computer, but recognizing discussion of the algorithm as protected speech.

But no such distinction is meaningful in practice. Touretzky created an online ``gallery of CSS descramblers'' (cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery).

The court had banned distribution of the source code, so one exhibit in the gallery was a picture of the code in GIF files. Was that covered by the ban?

Then he translated the code, line by line, into English. ``Surely this version was protected speech. But any beginning programmer'' could convert it back. And how about a T-shirt bearing the code? Could the court ban wearing the shirt where someone else might see it?

The gallery quickly received many creative and expressive exhibits. A dramatic reading of the source code file. Class notes from a tutorial on the program. A translation of the code into musical notation which can be played. An algorithm for encoding it as a prime number. And an inspired but anonymous author contributed a version in haiku.

Reader, see how yet

technical communicants

deserve free speech rights

see how numbers, rules,

patterns, languages you don't

yourself speak yet

still should in law be

protected from suppression,

called valuable speech!

(702 words)