Touretzky - Free Speech Activism

Free Speech Activism

David Touretzky is an Internet free speech activist. He has supported several movements in what he perceives as abuse of the legal system by government and private authorities.

In 2000, Touretzky testified as an expert witness for the defense in Universal City Studios et al. v. Reimerdes et al., a suit brought by seven motion picture studios against the publishers of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly (the case name refers to Shawn Reimerdes, an unrelated defendant who settled prior to trial.) The suit concerned the publication of DVD decryption software known as DeCSS, which the plaintiffs asserted was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Dr. Touretzky testified as an expert in computer science on the expressive nature of computer code, and convinced the court that code was indeed speech. Touretzky also created an online gallery of various renditions of the DeCSS software. Readers sent in their own renditions of the decryption algorithm, including a mathematical description, a haiku, and a square dance.

In reaction to the federal prosecution and eventual imprisonment of 18-year old political activist Sherman Austin for hosting bomb-making instructions entitled Reclaim Guide on his web site, Dr. Touretzky provided a mirror on his Carnegie Mellon website for more than two years, although he acknowledged on the website that his own reposting of the information did not violate the plain language of the statute under which Austin was convicted. In May 2004, to avoid harassment of the university and controversy in the media, Dr. Touretzky moved the mirror from the Carnegie Mellon server to a private site.

In 2011, Touretzky began hosting a mirror of the website of George Hotz, containing executable files and instructions facilitating the jailbreaking of the Sony PlayStation 3, after Sony filed lawsuits against Hotz and other hackers aiming to utilize the takedown provisions of the DMCA to remove the content from the Internet.