My Slashdot interview was just posted. Slashdot readers asked me several interesting questions about law and technology.
What Was Blackboard Thinking?
April 17, 2003 by
Most businesses know that it’s wise to honor the values of their customers. So you’ve got to wonder what Blackboard was thinking when it sued to block a conference presentation last weekend.
Blackboard’s customers are colleges and universities. As Karl-Friedrich Lenz observes, these are organizations that hold freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry as central values. Seeking an injunction against both speech and inquiry, as Blackboard did, and making that injunction so broad, has got to rub many of Blackboard’s customers the wrong way.
Blackboard’s defensive and somewhat misleading press release may be a sign of the bind it has created for itself. The release implies that each Blackboard product either is physically secure, or relies on cryptography for protection. The two students, Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith, were reportedly going to say that the product in question used neither method of security, but was basically open to abuse by anyone who could unscrew a few screws. There could have been a debate about who was right, but Blackboard wouldn’t allow that to happen. Most observers will conclude, sensibly, that Blackboard tried to block that debate because it expected to lose it.
Like most censorship attempts, Blackboad’s strategy has backfired. They have only drawn attention to the content they tried to suppress, so that more Blackboard customers know about the students’ conclusion that Blackboard’s technology is insecure. All this, plus an affront to the values of Blackboard’s customers.
Come to think of it, Blackboard may have done a small service to educators after all – by providing an instructive example of the perils of censorship.
Students Write About RIAA/Student Lawsuits
April 17, 2003 by
Two of the best sources on the RIAA vs. student lawsuits come, appropriately, from other students.
Joe Barillari, a student in my “Information Technology and the Law” course at Princeton, has written an interesting analysis of the case against his fellow Princeton student Dan Peng. [Annoying disclaimer: Joe doesn’t speak for me; I don’t speak for Joe; neither of us speaks for Princeton.]
Zack Rosen, a student at Illinois, has written a primer on file sharing/searching technologies. He also describes how the “Napster-like” functionality, on which RIAA builds their contributory infringement case against the students, bears a very close similarity to search ffunctionality provided by Microsoft in Windows.
LaBrea Unavailable Due To Illinois SuperDMCA
April 16, 2003 by
Tom Liston, the author of the award-winning LaBrea security software, has announced that he will no longer make LaBrea available, because of concerns over the Super-DMCA, which has already become law in his native Illinois.
Network administrators can use LaBrea to set up a kind of virtual tarpit that entangles attempts by outsiders to scan their networks. (Network scanning is the online equivalent of walking down a hallway and trying to turn all of the doorknobs you find.) LaBrea uses a clever bit of indirection to trap scanners. Unfortunately, that indirection involves concealing the source and destination addresses of some network packets, so it raises Super-DMCA concerns.
I’m sure the supporters of the Super-DMCA in Illinois didn’t know that network scanning can be frustrated by a subtle method involving the concealment of packet addresses. They didn’t mean to ban LaBrea. But they may have done so accidentally. That’s what happens when you enact overbroad technology regulation.
Security Research Muzzled in Georgia
April 15, 2003 by
A state court in Georgia has issued temporary restraining order, which forced the cancellation of a conference panel this past weekend. A company called Blackboard, which sells campus automation systems to colleges and universities, convinced the court to block the publication of embarrassing details about Blackboard products.
Blackboard sent a demand letter. Blackboard filed a complaint, which convinced the court to issue a temporary restraining order. A mirror of one defendant’s web site is also available.
The complaint is constructed, as the lawyers say, “artfully”. They vilify one of the defendants, without saying much about the other defendant; but they ask for an injunction against both. They gleefully quote one defendant calling himself a “hacker”, apparently unaware that “hacker” is still a legitimate term of respect in some circles. They quote a law against distributing “access codes” and then trumpet a defendant’s distribution of “code”. And so on.
There is no mention in these documents of the enormous free speech issue here. The injunction is a prior restraint on speech, which prevented the defendants from speaking to an specific audience that had gathered to hear them. Yet somehow neither Blackboard nor the court indicated that any consideration of the First Amendment was even necessary.
The court will hold a hearing on the case tomorrow.
UPDATE (April 17, 8:50 AM): The hearing has been deferred for 45 days. Also note that, contrary to some reports, the complaint and injunction did not mention the DMCA. For more information about this case, see John R. Hall’s FAQ.
