The federal government has filed a brief to block University professor Edward Felten from suing to overturn the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, alleging that the plaintiff's claim is "unripe." Last year Felten, a computer science professor at the University, led a team in developing a method to bypass digital copyright protections in music files.
The government's brief, filed on Sept. 25, states, "The Plaintiffs do not have legal interests adverse . . . to the DCMA because they have not been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution under that statute."
Felten did, however, receive a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America, the group representing the recording industry, which stated that the publication of his code-breaking technology would result in a civil suit.
"Certainly we were threatened," Felten said. "The threats have not been fully retracted by the RIAA and their friends . . . Just the fact that a law exists that could send me to jail for six months [for releasing research] is enough of a threat."
Felten's case rests on the assumption that the threat of prosecution or civil suit under the DCMA would prevent those studying encryption technology from publishing their findings. Felten claims the restriction would violate his First Amendment right to free speech.
Representing Felten is the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet free-speech advocacy group. EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said, "Regardless of specific government or industry threats in the past, scientists should not have to experience the ongoing chilling effects of this vague digital copyright law."
Congress passed the DCMA with the support of the recording industry to fight Internet media piracy made commonplace by services such as Napster. The law enables authors of technology to subvert copyright protection measures making them liable to lawsuit or prosecution.
Felten, who is on sabbatical from the University, is temporarily at Stanford University Law School, home of a think tank called the Center for Internet and Society.
Explaining his decision to take time away from teaching to study law, Felten said, "It became clear that legal factors would have an increasingly large effect on science and technology."
The brief is the latest development in a dispute that began last year when Felten and others succeeded in breaking the digital watermark the recording industry had developed to protect MP3 music files and other Internet media.
As part of the effort to combat Internet copyright infringement, the industry had sponsored a contest in which participants were challenged to break the file protection. The goal was to analyze potential weaknesses in the watermark, which prevents copyrighted digital music from being copied across the Internet.
Rather than accepting the cash prize, however, Felten announced his intention to publish the findings, an action which quickly produced the threat of a lawsuit. Felten then sued the federal government, the RIAA and others, seeking protection from the DCMA.
The brief will be argued before a federal judge in Trenton on Nov. 28, but a ruling on whether the case may proceed is not expected for some time.
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