You know what conventions need more of? Lawyers standing by to offer free legal consultation. Man, if only BlogPhiladelphia 2007 had something like that!
The Black Hat USA 2008 conference featured a booth staffed by lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to consult with attendees who might have questions about the legality of hacking practices. Legal assistance has been informally set up by the EFF in the past but the group launched a formal Coders’ Rights during this year’s Black Hat conference. To wit:
The Coders’ Rights Project will build upon EFF’s long history of work to limit the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from reaching security and encryption researchers. EFF will also expand its involvement in matters involving the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime laws. Additionally, EFF has created resources for programmers doing work involving reverse engineering and vulnerability reporting, available at http://eff.org/coders.
According to the EFF, the Coders’ Rights goals also include narrowing computer-crime laws, and protecting reverse engineering, reviews, benchmarking, and the consumer’s right to tinker by limiting the power of End User License Agreements (EULAs).
