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The article focuses on a declaration filed by the U.S.-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in the federal court as of October 2001 regarding Felten v. Recording Industry Association of America case. Researcher Edward Felten and his fellow researchers at Princeton University, had entered a contest sponsored by Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), inviting people to attempt to crack certain technologies they were considering for use in their computer system. These technologies were defeated by Felten and his fellow researchers in the challenge. The paper of the researchers "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons From the SDMI Challenge," presented by them in a symposium in August 2001, is threatened under the anticircumvention provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The concern of ACM in this regard, is that one of ACM's primary goals is, in submitting a declaration to minimize the possibility of being a defendant in some future anticircumvention case. The declaration describes ACM, its scholarly activities relating to publishing and the holding of conferences, and the potential implications of the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA on what ACM does.

This article focuses on a declaration filed by the U.S.-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in federal court regarding the legal challenge to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the Felten v. RIAA case, as of October 2001. In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey by a number of computing researchers led by Princeton University computer scientist Edward Felten, the plaintiffs are asking the court to rule portions of the DMCA unconstitutional, arguing its broad prohibitions on disseminating information and technology restrict freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The declaration was filed in support of Felten and others to help the court understand the practical effect of the issues at stake in this case. ACM is also concerned that, in addition to harming the progress of research, the risk of legal liability under the DMCA threatens ACM's publication and sponsorship of professional conferences that might include scientific papers assessing the strengths and weaknesses of computer and data security measures.