IP: two lawsuits (from Edupage)

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

VIRGINIA PROFS CHALLENGE LAW RESTRICTING USE OF NET
Six Virginia college professors and the American Civil Liberties Union have
filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Virginia
state law that makes it a crime for state employees using state-owned
computers to "access, download, print or store any information . . . having
sexually explicit content."  Plaintiff Paul Smith of George Mason University
says "I don't think the state should be regulating anybody's free speech."
The Virginia law exempts state employees who can show they need computer
access to sexually explicit material for a "bona fide, agency-approved
research project or other agency-approved undertaking," but the professors
argue that the law would prevent them from teaching literature written by
such sexually explicit writers as Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg.
Co-plaintiff Melvin I. Urofsky, a Virginia Commonwealth University history
professor who has been teaching for 35 years, considers the law an "insult"
because "no one has ever told me what I can or cannot do in the classroom."
(Washington Post 9 May 97)


RSA, PGP IN LEGAL FLAP OVER ENCRYPTION TECHNOLOGY
RSA Data Security has filed a lawsuit against Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),
alleging that PGP failed to comply with the terms of a licensing agreement
that RSA had signed with Lemcom, the company with which PGP merged last
year.  RSA says Lemcom had "no ability to transfer rights to the source code
for the Licensed Product to an OEM Customer or anyone else."  When informed
that its license agreement to RSA technology was canceled, "PGP demanded we
sue them in order to exercise audit rights clearly laid out in the
agreement," says RSA President Jim Bidzos.  "Their behavior makes us wonder
what they have to hide."  Meanwhile, PGP says the products it's developing
don't rely on the RSA encryption scheme.  "Those new products will be
encryption-algorithm independent," says PGP VP Robert Kohn, which will
"break RSA monopoly on this technology."  (InfoWorld Electric 9 May 97)