The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a brief Wednesday defending a first-year Harvard Law School student’s right to crack protected computer code.

The ACLU’s 26-page brief, filed in federal lawsuit Edelman v. N2H2, details the claims of Benjamin G. Edelman ’02 that his First Amendment freedom to research Internet filtering software trumps restrictions of copyright law, trade secret law, the End User License Agreement (EULA), and most prominently, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The case has the potential to redefine national interpretation of the controversial DMCA. To date, its prohibition against the “circumvention of copyright protection systems” has been universally upheld by federal judges.

Edelman intends to research a filtering program created by N2H2, a Seattle software company. He is suing N2H2 to ensure his rights to discover and publish the expected result—the list of websites excluded by the software.

He said he considers the research important because many libraries and public schools have been required to purchase and install this and other filtering programs.

“The list is of significant importance in public policy,” he said. “The administrators of schools might like to know what the software they’ve purchased is doing.”

Edelman said that N2H2 Internet Filtering “is reasonably consistently found to block the most actually explicit sites,” but that it “blocks somewhat too much—it’s known to have a high false positive rate.”

For instance, the software has blocked access to breast cancer information as well as Congressional campaign websites and the online home of Planned Parenthood.

Edelman’s current research arose from previous work he did for the ACLU. The group picked Edelman to conduct research on Internet filtering software for their case challenging the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal statute that required public libraries to purchase and install filters.

Edelman offered expert testimony in the case earlier this year on his two-year study of filters, which included N2H2 Internet Filtering. The ACLU agreed to represent Edelman when the legal perils of his current research became evident.

The ACLU’s preemptive legal strategy aims at getting the court to affirm Edelman’s rights under the Declaratory Judgment Act, a federal statute that allows a judge to rule on a party’s rights in a legal controversy.

“That’s what this lawsuit is about—asking the court that if I’m able to look inside N2H2’s software and determine what sites it blocks, then I may do so without fear of legal liability,” Edelman said.

Edelman and the ACLU hope to avert legal action by N2H2 down the road, claiming that filings issued by N2H2 constitute an explicit threat to take Edelman to court if he uncovers and publishes their filtering list.

“We...intend to assert all of our legal rights against Edelman if he engages in future activity that violates the agreement or our proprietary rights,” said N2H2 in its most recent 10-Q filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But N2H2 spokesperson David Burt said the company has not “specifically threatened to sue Mr. Edelman, but we’d reserve the right to do so.”