FC: CMU computer scientist becomes a thorn in the MPAA's side

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42475,00.html
   
   A Thorn in the MPAA's Side
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   2:00 a.m. Mar. 20, 2001 PST
   
   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.

[...]



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