t's bad enough that I don't have a computer science degree; now I'm starting to wish I'd gone to law school. Some of the most interesting computing developments of recent months have more to do with torts than with tech. It's not just antitrust law either; many of the legal disputes involve questions of free-speech rights and the limits of civil disobedience.
There's the Cyber Patrol case, for instance. Microsystems Software of Framingham makes Cyber Patrol, a program that blocks out Net sites that some people might find offensive. Well, there are others who find the very existence of Cyber Patrol offensive - ''censorware,'' they call it. Two such ''hacktivists'' unscrambled Cyber Patrol and used their knowledge to build CPHack, a program that reveals the sites Cyber Patrol blocks, and that also makes it easy to deactivate the program.
Microsystems went to court, saying that CPHack was a violation of its copyright, because it was created with Cyber Patrol's own code. A Boston federal judge has ordered pretty much everybody on the Internet with a copy of CPHack to remove it from their Web sites.
Can the judge do that? The American Civil Liberties Union says no, announcing yesterday that it's appealing the ruling. I wish I could take this delightfully simple view of the matter. But to a mind uncontaminated by legal expertise, it seems like a tough call.
If the CPHackers had merely revealed the list of sites Cyber Patrol blocks, they'd probably be untouchable. You can't copyright a list of factual information - even I know that. But do the hackers have a right to use someone else's code to create a program that prevents the original program from working? Isn't that a sort of theft or vandalism?
That one's not clear. The Boston judge, in issuing his injunction, seemed to think this is unacceptable. But there's this 1988 case, Vault v. Quaid, that suggests otherwise.
Vault Corp.'s program prevented software piracy, by making it impossible to copy data from a floppy disk. Quaid Software studied Vault's program and used that knowledge to write software that defeated the Vault system. And guess what? A federal court said Quaid's software was A-OK, even though it effectively destroyed Vault's business. I can see why the ACLU appealed the Cyber Patrol injunction. Odd though it might seem to my untrained mind, the CPHackers could yet win this thing.
There's plenty more such litigation ahead too, as other hacktivists use their programming skills to protest various corporate practices. We'll probably hear a lot about a group called RTMark, best known for an international Net campaign to shut down the popular toy retailing Web site eToys.
It seems that eToys had found out about an arts Web site called etoy.com, and demanded that the site change its name. But etoy.com had been founded years before eToys came along, and said
it had every right to its Internet domain name. eToys got a federal judge to issue an injunction against its tiny adversary. But outraged RTMark members publicly vowed to launch hacker attacks against eToys during the 1999 Christmas shopping season, to crash the site and punish the company for its arrogance.
It didn't happen, but all the bad publicity forced eToys to back down. Score one for the good guys, I guess.
But if RTMark had roasted eToys's servers, wouldn't that be a crime? After all, the FBI is still chasing the vandals who recently shut down some of the world's biggest Web sites.
''If we think we can get away with it, we do it, yeah,'' says RTMark spokesman Ray Thomas - not his real name, by the way. ''The legality of it is really a touchy issue.'' Because RTMark has never been taken to court over an Internet sabotage campaign, Thomas says it is willing to consider launching more acts of civil disobedience, aimed at the overwhelming power of greedy corporations.
Then there are the ''electrohippies,'' a group bitterly opposed to genetically modified food crops. They're currently recruiting volunteers to help them launch crippling attacks on corporate Web sites beginning next Monday.
The hacktivists still seem to believe the old myth that Internet technology will always keep them a step ahead of the laws. Bill Gates has lately learned otherwise, and so will these lads, in time. I'd better get used to reading legal briefs. I expect to see quite a few of them.
Hiawatha Bray is a member of the Globe Staff. He can be reached by
e-mail at bray@globe.com.
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