4-05-00
CINCINNATI (AP) - Computer programs used to scramble electronic messages are protected by the First Amendment because those codes are a means of communication among programmers, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
Raymond Vasvari, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said the ruling was the first time a federal appellate court has decided that computer programming languages are protected by the First Amendment.
``This is a great day for programmers, computer scientists and all Americans who believe that privacy and intellectual freedom should be free from government control,'' he said.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling means a lawsuit filed by a Cleveland law professor will be reconsidered in federal court. Peter D. Junger's lawsuit claims the government violated his free-speech rights by requiring licenses to export programs that scramble electronic messages.
The encryption programs allow the scrambling of a message from its original, plain text form to protect the contents when the message is sent through an accessible forum like the Internet.
Encryption can be used, among other things, for securing information such as consumers' credit card numbers.
Junger, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, wanted to put the encryption codes on his Web site to help his computer-law students understand the function and purpose of computer programs, said his lawyer, Gino Scarselli. The government told him he had to have a license first.
Appeals judges Boyce Martin Jr., Eric Clay and Herman Weber reversed a lower court's 1998 ruling that the government's license requirement did not violate the First Amendment.
The appeals judges noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment protects the Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll and the work of artists and musicians. Those are not traditional speech, nor is computer source code, the judges wrote.
Justice Department lawyer Scott McIntosh said he had not seen the decision Tuesday and could not comment on it.