It's an exhausting conundrum. In America, we like to think that the Constitution settled some questions for us, establishing a foundation for progress. Free speech is a given, a basic right. Thinking back even further to Shays' Rebellion, we recall that local American governments both taxed excessively, and at one time took it upon themselves to cancel debts.
Property rights are crucial to the exercise of other rights.
Yet, today, property rights and free speech rights appear on a collision course, as more and more property becomes electronic, subject to the probing and discussion of its underlying structures. This week, the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet report that members of the recording industry consortium known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative are trying to quash the publication of academic research into the security of their anti-piracy efforts. In a letter dated April 9, Matthew Oppenheim, the head of the SDMI Foundation, urged Princeton computer science professor Eric Felten to not deliver a conference paper to the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop, Wednesday, April 25, in Pittsburgh about his ability to crack digital watermarks in the SDMI project. Apparently Felten was, according to ZDNet, originally involved in an SDMI-sponsored contest to test SDMI watermarks. But for whatever reason, he dropped out, and hacked the watermarks independently, so that he would be able to publish his results.