Our friend Ben Edelman is in the news everywhere:

The New York Times
Slashdot
How Appealling

Why? Well he and the ACLU have challenged the evil (and I believe rediculously unconstitutional) Digital Millenium Copyright Act which forbids people to break any protection system for copyrighted works regardless of whether it would be fair use, or even whether the copyright has run out. The particular issue at hand is asking the court "to rule that a computer researcher has First Amendment and 'fair use' rights to examine the full list of sites contained in an Internet blocking program and to share his research tools and results with others."

The ACLU's press release is here and there complaint is here (links via How Appealling and Slashdot). The case is actually called "Edelman v. N2H2, Inc." If he wins this one he'll not only be a cult hero, he'll also be immortalized in the law.

Quote of the day:
"I don't want to go to jail. I want to go to law school."
--Ben Edelman

Unfortunately he didn't mention any of this when we had lunch last week, he's news of the week then was his research into people stealing domain names by claiming to have names like "city, circuit" in order to get circuitcity.name, etc.

Ben's website still is here.