There's no denying the blizzard of litigation in the digital music space during the past year, but not all of the lawyers involved are working for big corporations, major labels or the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

For more than a decade, a busy band of intrepid attorneys has worked at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) "to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression in the arena of computers and the Internet." Increasingly, those issues have to do with digital music. Just a few weeks ago, the EFF asked a federal court to rule that Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor, and his research team have the First Amendment right to present a paper on digital music access-control technologies at a security conference in Washington, D.C., in August.

Felten and his team cracked four music-copyright protection codes offered up in a challenge by the Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation last fall. But after the contest's first phase, the professor and his team opted out and announced that rather than claiming the contest's cash prize, Felten would publish a paper for the computer-science community detailing how his team had defeated the codes. Just before Felten was about to go public, he received a letter from RIAA Senior VP Matthew Oppenheim that said if his team published the results, Felten could face legal action, apparently for violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which essentially makes it illegal to build or distribute tools for circumventing copyright protection measures.

When Felten subsequently withdrew the paper, he was showered with media attention, much of it critical of both the SDMI and the RIAA. Oppenheim quickly issued a statement basically saying that it was all a big misunderstanding and that nobody was under threat of a lawsuit. But EFF staff attorney Robin Gross, who specializes in intellectual property with a focus on digital music and copyright issues, says she believes First Amendment issues are at play in the SDMI-Felten case. "Their statement that they were never really going to sue doesn't pass the giggle test," Gross says, speaking from her San Francisco office. With Felten's paper since accepted for publication at the USENIX Security Conference in August, the EFF is hoping that a New Jersey judge will rule in Felten's team's favor by the time the event takes place.

The EFF has been openly critical of the DMCA for quite some time, and increasingly interested in digital music hot-button issues such as peer-to-peer systems and fair use during the past year. As early as 1998, the organization said the DMCA contained an "overly broad prohibition" against "circumventing technological measures that control access to a copyrighted work." Basically, it all comes back to freedom of speech, Gross says. "The way it's written now, it is illegal for journalists to link to Web sites where something that could be a circumvention device could reside."

As if that weren't scary enough, there's more. "All of the songs that were going to be locked up by this SDMI watermarking technology are supposed to fall into the public domain at some point," Gross explains. But currently, she says there's no mechanism in place to unlock the songs, and the DMCA makes it illegal to come up with tools to access works that rightfully belong to the public.

So if this is a war, who's winning? It's too early to tell - the battles over digital music have just started heating up, and it'll be years until the dust clears and a clear victor emerges. In the meantime, expect to see lots of litigation. "If history has taught us anything, it's that the industry's first reaction is to freak out," Gross says. "They get really nervous and fight against the technology by using lawsuits, litigation and legislation to keep things the way they are. But as technology and society moves forward, they'll find a way to profit from it."

But in the meantime, Felten's case wages on. We could see some headway as early as this summer in the ongoing struggle over the future of digital music when a ruling comes down.