[Infowarrior] - Coupon Hacker Faces DMCA Lawsuit

[Richard Forno]

http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/coupons

Coupon Hacker Faces DMCA Lawsuit
By David Kravets Email 08.20.07 | 2:00 AM
John Stottlemire is accused of posting Coupon Inc.'s proprietary software
online for consumer use, which allegedly violates the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act.
Photo: Courtesy of John Stottlemire

John Stottlemire is the DVD Jon of coupon-clipping, and it's getting him in
trouble.

The California man is on the working end of a federal copyright lawsuit
after posting code and instructions that allow shoppers to circumvent copy
protection on downloadable, printable coupons -- the type used by General
Foods, Colgate, Disney and others to sell everything from soap to breakfast
cereal.

The coupons are distributed by Mountain View, California-based Coupons Inc.
through ad banners, e-mail and its website, coupons.com. To use them,
consumers must install Coupons Inc.'s proprietary software. The software
assigns each user's computer a unique identifier, which the company uses to
track and control the consumer's coupon-printing practices, usually limiting
each user to two coupons per product. Each printed coupon has its own unique
serial code.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, last
month, Coupons Inc. accuses Stottlemire of creating and giving away a
program that erases the unique identifier, allowing consumers to repeatedly
download and print as many copies of a particular coupon as they want.

The lawsuit also charges Stottlemire with posting tutorials on
bargain-swapping sites DealIdeal.com and thecouponqueen.net on how to
manually defeat the print limit, which the complaint alleges "would allow
users of that software to print an unlimited number of coupons from the
coupons.com website."

Stottlemire, 42, of Fremont, California, insists there was no encryption or
hacking involved, and therefore he did not violate the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act. "I honestly think there are big problems when you are not
allowed to delete files off of your computer," says Stottlemire.

To be sure, Stottlemire's work differs from the generic online copyright
battles involving movies, music or even literature: He's accused of
liberating something that is already free. But Coupons Inc. argues the
coupon hack is no different from cracks like "DVD Jon" Johansen's program
DeCSS.

Scores of companies contract with Coupons Inc. to release a limited number
of coupons for each product. If somebody cracks the code and downloads
hundreds or thousands of them, it's consumers who lose, according to CEO
Jeff Weitzman.

"We're protecting copyrighted information that is free to consumers
already," says Weitzman. "We're trying to make sure everybody can get their
fair share."

Ironically, Stottlemire says his motive was to get a job at Coupons Inc. "My
goal was to show Jeff my capabilities and to ask him for employment," he
says. But motives aside, Stottlemire says the case now raises bigger issues:
How can a computer owner be prohibited from deleting files from his own
computer?

"All I did was erase files or registry keys," he says. "Nothing was hacked.
Nothing was decoded that was any way, shape or form in the way the DMCA was
written."

Legal experts aren't so sure.

"I think it's a pretty broad statute," says Carl Tobias, a professor at the
University of Richmond School of Law. "It may cover this. I think it does
give companies a lot of leverage and a lot of power."

Jim Gibson, a University of Virginia School of Law visiting scholar who
teaches copyright law, suggests Stottlemire might be swimming in legally
murky waters at best.

"He might be in trouble for providing technology that is designed for
essentially hacking around copyright protection," Gibson says. "Whether as a
matter of public policy there should be a claim against him is a completely
different story."

Stottlemire says he's being sued because Coupons Inc. "does not have the
technology in place that would limit the number of times that a person could
print a coupon."

The 500 brands Coupons Inc. represents also suffer from fraud the
old-fashioned way. They fall victim to photocopying of their coupons.
Weitzman says the company shuts off coupon-printing access to violators if
photocopied coupons with the same serial numbers show up at markets.

That hurts the companies' bottom line, Weitzman says.

"We monitor those things very carefully," he says. "If we do see duplicates
coming through, we have ways from keeping people from printing coupons in
the future."

The company wants Stottlemire to turn over the names of people he knows
downloaded his software, and is seeking damages from the coder that could
amount to hundreds of thousands -- or even millions -- of dollars. And it's
not offering him 10 percent off.