this from economist magazine (august 4, 2000) IN ONE of the more chilling scenes of George Orwell's "1984", the citizens of Oceania gather in a cinema to denounce Emmanuel Goldstein, a political dissident, as "the Enemy of the People". In New York, for the past two weeks, a team of Hollywood lawyers have been doing much the same to Emmanuel Goldstein, an Internet journalist. Mr Goldstein, who was born Eric Corley, is the editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He posted on his newsletter's website a code known as DeCSS. This code undoes the encryption technologies that protect a digital video disc from being copied. The Hollywood studios are therefore accusing Mr Goldstein of helping to pirate their films, their copyrighted intellectual property. He says he is upholding freedom of expression. The DeCSS code has already had a brush with the law in Europe. Earlier this year, Norwegian police raided the house of one of DeCSS's creators, a 16-year-old called Jon Johansen, and confiscated his computer equipment. And Hollywood's case looks solid: a provision of American copyright law prohibits any "circumvention" of anti-copying encryption technology. But legal experts say there are broader issues at stake. As Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, points out, copyright is itself a restriction on free speech; most people support it only because it encourages publishing. Part of Mr Goldstein's defence is a technical one (he claims that DeCSS also has "fair" legal uses, including reformatting video discs for viewing on other sorts of machines). But his case also brings up two issues about freedom of speech in cyberspace. First, Mr Goldstein did not create the code himself; he merely put the code on his website and provided links to other websites where it could be found. That, argue his lawyers, is an act of pure reportage and is protected by the first amendment. Second, the source code that makes up DeCSS may itself be a form of speech. In April, an appeals court in another jurisdiction found in favour of Peter Junger, a law professor who had posted the code for encryption software on the Internet, in violation of American export controls. The court found Mr Junger's code "an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming", and so protected by the first amendment as surely as music, art or poetry would be. The Junger decision is not a binding precedent in the Goldstein case, which goes on next week. But, if Mr Goldstein loses, the law would seem to have made an odd distinction: code that encrypts, like Mr Junger's, would be freer than code that decrypts, like Mr Goldstein's. Truly Orwellian. ------------------------------------------------ An alpha version of a web based tool to manage your subscription with this mailing list is at http://lists.linux-india.org/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr
