Dave Touretzky might seem like an unlikely champion of free expression.
The 41-year-old researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh spends his evenings investigating how the brains of rats record and process location information.
"My primary research interest is understanding how space is represented in the rodent brain," says Touretzky, who regularly works until 2 a.m.
What that translates into is computer simulations, occasional surgery on hapless members of the species rattus norvegicus, and programming a squat metal robot to wander the fifth floor lobby of Wean Hall.
But Touretzky is also a fierce advocate of the First Amendment and the Internet, and has spent much of the last decade battling to protect the ability of students, programmers and critics to speak freely online.
Seven years ago, he fought against former CMU president Robert Mehrabian's decision to censor sex-themed Usenet newsgroups from campus computers, and his website with details about the Church of Scientology's secret scriptures drew legal threats from the church's notoriously censorial attorneys.
Touretzky's latest project is no less controversial: a Gallery of CSS Descramblers that thumbs its nose at the Motion Picture Association of America by exhaustively documenting how to decrypt DVDs. It includes every known computer program that does so.
In a high-profile lawsuit, MPAA member companies successfully sued to bar one website from distributing just one version of the "DeCSS" utility -- and Touretzky's gallery includes dozens.
"The MPAA folks have stumbled into this problem," Touretzky said. "In order to accomplish what they want to accomplish, they're going to have to restrict people's speech."
The how-to-descramble CSS gallery -- the term comes from the industry-developed Content Scamble System that encodes DVDs -- almost begs Hollywood to sue over what it views as both trade-secret disclosures and a flagrant violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
But Touretzky says that so far, the MPAA has only fired off threatening letters. In one nastygram last month, MPAA anti-piracy official Hemanshu Nigam said: "We therefore demand that you take appropriate steps to cause the immediate removal of DeCSS from the above identified Internet site, along with such other actions as may be necessary or appropriate to suspend this illegal activity."
Touretzky's response? To ask Nigam whether the movie industry seriously claims that a photo of a T-shirt on which the C source code appears or an MP3 file of someone chanting the source code -- with guitar and drum music, no less -- violates federal copyright or trade secret law. (The MPAA has yet to reply.)
"I don't object to content providers wanting to discourage piracy," says Touretzky, who testified for the defense in the MPAA suit in New York federal court. "But there's a limit to how far they can go.... The movie industry is happy to destroy important parts of our technology to protect their interests."
The technology he's talking about is the relatively open PC platform, which currently does not enforce copyright protection of content -- a boon to hackers and programmers, but a growing concern for Hollywood.
Like an increasing number of technologists, Touretzky is afraid that standards like the controversial Content Protection for Recordable Media will gradually nudge everyone into using systems where songs are encrypted and can only be played on specific computers.
"Even if we get this (DeCSS) code distributed everywhere, it's just going to strengthen the hand of the content companies to argue that people can't be trusted to have control of their own computers and the government must enforce controls over computers," Touretzky said. "They're going to do that by implementing stuff like CPRM.
"This started out as the hackers showing it's not so easy to restrict information," Touretzky continued. "No matter what laws the MPAA passes, it's not so easy to reverse-engineer stuff."
That sounds a lot like libertarianese, and Touretzky said that like many other coders, he is one: "I'm a libertarian with a small L. The big-L Libertarians are anarchist loons. But the little-L libertarians -- it strikes me that most computer people fit in that category."
His all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-CSS gallery has created an unusual side effect: It's spurred a kind of competition to see what programmer can write the shortest CSS descrambler.
Earlier this month, Touretzky added a program that descrambled a DVD using only 472 bytes of Perl code. Written by Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz -- members of MIT's Student Information Processing Board -- their qrpff utility is a more compact cousin of the DeCSS utility that eight movie studios are trying to delete from the Web (qrpff is DeCSS in rot-13, where the letters are shifted by 13 places).
Last week, along came an even shorter version, written in C, to claim the record at only 442 bytes. That CSS descrambler, by Charles Hannum, has the advantage of being a bit faster than its Perl relative -- so movies will play without jerkiness.
Its size makes it almost small enough to, say, put on a business card or cocktail napkin. "As a practical matter," says Touretzky, "you can't stop people from exchanging information. It's like stopping people from having sex: They're going to do what they're going to do."
"Everyone who voted for the DMCA should be publicly flogged," Touretzky added.
Linux users say that they should have the right to watch legally purchased DVDs on their computers by using DeCSS-type utilities. But in a brief filed last month, the Bush administration sided with the movie industry against DeCSS, saying that software is not speech-protected by the First Amendment -- but can be regulated like parts of a machine: "This function is entirely nonexpressive, and thus does not warrant First Amendment protection."
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled last August that DeCSS was akin to a "common-source outbreak epidemic" that violated the law's prohibition against circumventing copyright-protection technology. The DMCA prohibits anyone from publishing or publicly distributing any hardware or software that "is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."
To Touretzky, his fight against the movie industry's attempt to suppress the spread of DeCSS is hauntingly similar to his encounters with the Church of Scientology, which he describes as a "rich and vengeful religious cult." (Church representatives were hardly pleased with his reposting of information about Xenu, the apparent space alien who's part of the Scientology scriptures.)
"There are really interesting parallels between the Scientology cases and the DeCSS cases that nobody wants to talk about in public," Touretzky said. "(Both groups) use trade secret and copyright law to crush critics."
(In fact, he says, the same attorney -- Michael Mervis -- who deposed him in a related DeCSS lawsuit once represented the church.)
Aside from free speech crusades, Touretzky's lab work focuses on how space -- objects and locations -- is represented in rat brains. He believes that cells in the rat's hippocampus fire (activate) when the rodent wanders into a certain location and form a kind of cognitive map of the environment.
"Studying the place cell system will give us insight into how brains compute complicated things, and that in turn will better prepare us to understand monkey brains and, eventually, human brains," Touretzky said.
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