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EFF and U.C. Berkeley Defend Accused Coupon Hacker in DMCA Suit

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley are coming to the rescue of a California man sued for posting code and instructions that allow shoppers to circumvent copy protection on downloadable, printable coupons.

The coupons, for General Foods, Colgate, Disney and others, are distributed by California-based Coupons Inc. through ad banners, e-mail and its website -- coupons.com. To access them, consumers must install Coupons Inc.'s proprietary software. The software assigns each user's computer a unique identifier, which the company uses to track and control the consumer's coupon-printing practices, usually limiting each user to two coupons per product. Each printed coupon has its own unique serial code.

The site is suing John Stottlemire in federal court, accusing the Fremont man of creating and giving away a program that erases the unique identifier, allowing consumers to repeatedly download and print as many copies of a particular coupon as they want.

The lawsuit also charges Stottlemire, who has been defending himself in court, with posting tutorials on bargain-swapping sites DealIdeal.com and thecouponqueen.net on how to manually defeat the print limit.

A hearing on the lawsuit, which tests the limits of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is set for April 22 in San Jose, California.

Stottlemire's work differs from the generic copyright battles involving movies, music or even literature: He's accused of liberating something that is already free. Coupons Inc. argues the coupon hack is no different from the likes of "DVD Jon" Johansen's program DeCSS.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, the digital rights groups wrote Tuesday that the DMCA might not cover Stottlemire's alleged conduct. Coupons.com, for example, equally provides access to coupons to those that use Stottlemire's program and to those that do not. No circumvention is necessary to access the copyrighted work in question -- a coupon.

The site's security measures Stottlemire was able to circumvent are solely intended to prevent users from printing additional, unauthorized copies of coupons. Stottlemire never gave consumers the keys of access, because the copyrighted works were accessible to anybody at coupons.com, the groups wrote. Stottlemire did nothing like providing the tools to decode encryption on DVDs, the groups added.

Hence, Stottlemire did not build a program to circumvent a "technology protection measure," which the groups said "must control complete access to a work, making circumvention necessary to gain any access to the work at all."

DVD encryption, the groups wrote, "was found to be an effective access control because it prevented any viewing of the underlying movie."

The digital rights groups also told the court that, among other things, Stottlemire's online tutorials are speech protected by the First Amendment.

Coupons.com also falls prey to photocopying of its coupons. The company shuts off coupon-printing access to customer accounts if photocopied coupons with the same serial numbers from that account show up at markets.

Photo Waffle Whiffer

See Also:

• The pressure is on for HD DVD
• DMCA Abuser Apologizes, Will Take Copyright Law Course
• Congress Moves to Reshape DMCA
• Extra Extra: Threat Level Wants Your Apple Conspiracy Theory ...
• Nation's Largest Textbook Seller Copyrights Class Textbook Listings
• EMI, MP3tunes Wage Copyright War
• Anti-P2P Company Gets Bit by the Torrent

Full post as published by Threat Level on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).