Testimony of Scott Bradner, Internet Engineering Task Force
March 21, 1996
7
1 JUDGE DALZELL: Okay, fine, that's very helpful.
2 Thank you.
3 Okay, do you want to -- it's Mr. Bradner, is it?
4 MR. MORRIS: Yes, your Honor, my name is John
5 Morris, co-counsel for the ALA plaintiffs and plaintiffs call
6 as their first witness Scott O. Bradner.
7 MR. KMETZ: Your Honor, Mr. Jason Baron will be
8 handling the cross-examination.
9 JUDGE SLOVITER: And it's our understanding that
10 there will be only one lawyer per witness.
11 MR. KMETZ: That would be our understanding as well.
12 MR. MORRIS: That's certainly our understanding. If
13 the Court would indulge at the conclusion of any redirect we
14 might have, I will confer just momentarily among ourselves to
15 make sure that we're all on the same page.
16 JUDGE SLOVITER: We don't mind your conferring as
17 long as you don't mind our conferring --
18 (Laughter.)
19 JUDGE SLOVITER: -- because a three-judge court is
20 something new for all of us, three-judge District Court.
21 THE COURT CLERK: Sir, will you state and spell your
22 full name for the record?
23 THE WITNESS: Scott Bradner, S-c-o-t-t
24 B-r-a-d-n-e-r.
25 THE COURT CLERK: Will you place your left hand on
8
1 the Bible and raise your right hand?
2 SCOTT BRADNER, Plaintiffs' Witness, Affirmed.
3 MR. MORRIS: And at this point the plaintiffs would
4 move into admission the evidence of the previously filed
5 declaration of Mr. Bradner as sworn to on the 19th of this
6 month as his trial testimony.
7 And Mr. Bradner is available for examination by the
8 Government and certainly any questions the Court may have,
9 I'm sure he'd be happy to respond to.
10 JUDGE SLOVITER: Thank you. Is there any objection
11 to--
12 MR. BARON: No objection, your Honor.
13 JUDGE SLOVITER: -- accepting that as evidence,
14 fine. Proceed.
15 MR. BARON: Good morning, your Honors.
16 JUDGE SLOVITER: Good morning.
17 JUDGE DALZELL: Good morning.
18 JUDGE BUCKWALTER: Good morning.
19 CROSS-EXAMINATION
20 BY MR. BARON:
21 Q Good morning, Mr. Bradner. You state in your decla--
22 JUDGE SLOVITER: Excuse me. In the Court of Appeals
23 we always identify ourselves, we ask the counsel to identify
24 themselves for the record. Maybe that would be a good idea.
25 MR. BARON: My apologies, your Honor.
9
1 JUDGE SLOVITER: That's all right.
2 MR. BARON: I'm Jason R. Baron, B-a-r-o-n, counsel
3 to the U.S. Department of Justice.
4 JUDGE SLOVITER: Thank you.
5 MR. BARON: Thank you, your Honor.
6 BY MR. BARON:
7 Q Mr. Bradner, you state in your declaration that you are
8 co-area director of something called the IETF. Could you, in
9 a nutshell, tell us what the IETF is and what does it do?
10 A The Internet Engineering Task Force is a self-organizing
11 group which developed out of some U.S. Federal Government
12 networking initiatives many years ago and it is the group
13 which now is primarily responsible for developing standards
14 for use in the Internet protocol which is the basis upon
15 which the Internet runs.
16 Q The IETF has been in existence for about ten years,
17 correct?
18 A That is correct. I'd be clear that it predates my
19 involvement so I'm taking that from what others have said.
20 Q Okay. Would it be fair to say that the IETF defines
21 standards for the Internet Protocol suite?
22 A That is -- yes, it would be fair to say that.
23 Q Could you explain for the Court what is the Internet
24 Protocol, otherwise known as IP?
25 A The Internet itself consists of many networks connected
10
1 together by other networks. The Internet Protocol is that
2 part of the protocol suite, that part of the language which
3 is used on the network which allows a piece of information
4 called a packet on one network to find its way to identify a
5 separate network and find its way to that separate network.
6 So the IP is the Internet Protocol that allows movement of
7 data between networks.
8 Q Different protocols make up IP suite, correct?
9 A That is correct.
10 Q Can you name a few for the Court?
11 A Well, the underlying protocol is the Internet Protocol or
12 IP. Riding on top of that are protocols such as TCP, the
13 Transmission Control Protocol, UDP, the Unreliable Datagram
14 Protocol, ICMP, the Internet Control Message Protocol.
15 Riding on top of TCP are protocols such as Telnet on the
16 World Wide Web, HTTP Protocols. It's a layer cake of various
17 different concoctions.
18 Q Well, we'll get into some of those in a few minutes. Who
19 comprises the IETF?
20 A As I said, the IETF is a self-organized group, we have
21 meetings three times a year. The membership is those who
22 attend the meetings and those who are on the mailing lists.
23 There are some 80 or so working groups, each of the working
24 groups maintains a mailing list and anybody who joins any of
25 those mailing lists is de facto part of the IETF.
11
1 There is an organizational structure within the IETF
2 which divides the working groups up into areas and then the
3 area, each area is managed by one or more, one or two area
4 directors.
5 Q We're going to get into that as well. People doing the,
6 quote, "standards work," unquote, on the IETF, are they
7 normally paid by corporations and businesses?
8 A Or they are paid by corporations or businesses or
9 universities or their private consultants.
10 Q Okay. Could you explain to the Court what an RFC is?
11 A RFC came from the original process of asking for
12 comments, it stood for request for comments, asking for
13 comments on thoughts on how to do some proposal. It is
14 progressed past that point now and RFC stands for RFC. It no
15 longer is a vehicle for comments. There is a new vehicle for
16 the comments which are called Internet drafts and they pre--
17 precede RFC's, but RFC's are the basic standardization
18 document series for the IETF.
19 Q RFC's exist that define a standards process for the
20 Internet, correct?
21 A There are a series of RFC's which have progressively
22 defined the standards process.
23 Q And some of the RFC's establishing a standards process
24 for the Internet are well established, correct?
25 A There is -- the original standards process was defined in
12
1 RFC-1310, that has been superseded by RFC-1602 which has been
2 in effect for a few years, I don't remember exactly what.
3 And within one of the working groups within the IETF is
4 called the Poise Working Group -- and don't ask me what that
5 stands for cause I don't know -- and that is in the process
6 of refining a third revision of the standards process. It's
7 now known as 1602 BIS because it has not gotten its own RFC
8 number yet. That should happen within a few weeks.
9 Q You're editing at least one RFC at the present time
10 having to do with Internet standards, correct?
11 A I am editing two of them; co-editing one and editing
12 another one.
13 Q Now, you mentioned an area within IETF, what is an area
14 within the IETF?
15 A An area is a grouping of working groups, normally trying
16 to make the -- it's normally tried to be done in a way which
17 is logical so that the working groups which are working on
18 security-related matters are grouped in the security area.
19 Working groups that are working on network management related
20 efforts are in the network management area.
21 Q Would it be fair to say that the area of operational
22 requirements that you are co-area director of has to do with
23 developing standards for the next generation of software for
24 the Internet?
25 A No, it would not be. The operational requirements area
13
1 is a little bit of a confusion point on the IETF in that one
2 of the things that we feel we must have is some kind of
3 feedback from the operation of a protocol to the protocol
4 developers and the operational requirements area does two
5 things: one, tries to make sure that when standards are
6 developed they can be done so, the resultant standards can
7 actually be operated in the real world rather than just in
8 the theoretical world. And then, second of all, if indeed
9 when these standards are deployed that there is any lessons
10 to be learned which should go back to the standards
11 developers that they are fed back.
12 I think what you may be referring to is the ad hoc
13 or the temporary IP Next Generation or IPNG area which is,
14 was working on and is currently working on extending for the
15 new generation of the IP protocol itself.
16 Q Well, you have also been the co-area director of the IP
17 Next Generation area, correct?
18 A That's correct.
19 Q It sounds a little bit like Star Trek; what does that
20 area consist of?
21 A It was purposely it sounds a little like Star Trek,
22 actually.
23 (Laughter.)
24 A It consists of the -- Allison Menkin and I were asked by
25 the -- by Phil Gross, the chair of the IETF, to put together
14
1 a temporary area to -- to group together all of the
2 activities involved, all of the proposals for a successor
3 protocol to IP to deal with scaling issues and the like and
4 to resolve the question of what should be "The Proposal" out
5 of the IETF-4 and IP Next Generation. There were a number of
6 proposals on the books when we were assigned the task of
7 forming this temporary area, we have made a recommendation on
8 what the next generation should be, that recommendation has
9 been accepted and the area right now is closing down because
10 it's very close to have finished publishing the initial set
11 of RFC's, the initial set of standards for IP Next
12 Generation.
13 Q Would it be fair to say, to summarize what you've just
14 said, that the IP Next Generation group is working on a new
15 generation of the IP Protocol itself?
16 A That is correct.
17 Q Does it have -- does the IP Next Generation group have
18 recommendations regarding a specific architecture of the
19 packet traffic on the Internet, including the format of the
20 packet?
21 A It has a recommendation on the format of the packet
22 itself that's actually the basic recommendation is the format
23 of the packet traffic itself. You used the word
24 "architecture" in your question and that's potentially
25 confusing because architecture could mean the way the
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1 networks are put together, it could mean the concept of how
2 the packets are flowed through the network, it could mean a
3 number of different things, so I would prefer to say that
4 we've defined the packet format itself and we have looked at
5 architecture in various areas but not come to a specific
6 recommendation on architecture.
7 JUDGE DALZELL: Sir, when you -- excuse me. When
8 you use the word "architecture" and it's in all -- a number
9 of the declarations, there's no -- that's not a term of art
10 that means one thing in this area?
11 THE WITNESS: It means -- it means one thing for
12 each of the areas that it's in. And it's as a security
13 architecture which ties together a unified view of how one
14 should do security.
15 There is a routing architecture which ties together
16 a unified view of how one should do routing which is the
17 keeping track of where networks are. So there are a number
18 of architectures depending on what particular topic we're on.
19 There isn't an overall architecture because at the moment
20 it's too complex a network with too many functions going on.
21 You have to look at the individual functions and do an
22 architecture on those.
23 We have done some work in that area, there is an
24 architecture for security, an IP Next Generation Security
25 which is now the general IP Security architecture and we have
16
1 looked at architecture in other areas, but it's difficult to
2 do to unify all of the thoughts together.
3 One of our recommendations in the -- in our
4 recommendation for IP Next Generation was to appoint an
5 individual to be an architect for IP Next Generation.
6 Unfortunately, there aren't many people who could do that
7 task and fewer of them with enough time to do it. So we in
8 the -- as Allison and I have acted as architects to make sure
9 that there's a consistent view of what IPNG, IP Next
10 Generation looks like across the various activities creating
11 protocols for it, the TCP Next Generation, the ICNP Next
12 Generation, the routing, security, all of these different
13 working groups working on different aspects of it, we're
14 trying to keep their view of what IP Next Generation looks
15 like as consistent.
16 So we in that context are acting as architects, but
17 it's architects is one of those words which depends on the
18 beholder.
19 JUDGE DALZELL: Depends on?
20 THE WITNESS: On the beholder.
21 JUDGE DALZELL: Okay. But you consider yourself
22 one?
23 THE WITNESS: In a real sense, no, I do not.
24 Architects tend to be more visionary than I tend to be in
25 this environment, intend to be more on intuitive feeling of
17
1 how the incredibly complicated world of the networking fits
2 together and what the implications are of making a change
3 some place.
4 I think that I can understand architecture, but I
5 would not go so far as to say that I am an architect in the
6 context of, for example, Dave Clark of MIT, Dr. Dave Clark,
7 who is -- who was the original IP architect and the one who--
8 and the person that unfortunately didn't have enough time to
9 be the IP Next Generation architect.
10 JUDGE DALZELL: But, for example, in the stipulation
11 and we hear a lot about the packet switching, for example.
12 Now, would that be like, to continue the metaphor, a brick
13 that is commonly used in all forms of architecture?
14 THE WITNESS: It's -- maybe it's more of a fact of
15 life of the forms of architecture, but --
16 JUDGE DALZELL: Because that's unchanging, the
17 packet switching concept, that's not going to change?
18 THE WITNESS: One of the areas that we specifically
19 addressed in working on IP Next Generation was what are the
20 paradigms which we want to follow in IP Next Generation and
21 one of them was we wanted to preserve what is called the
22 Datagram mode which is the packet mode.
23 The alternative to that is circuit switching like a
24 telephone where you do a call setup, you do initialization
25 and all of the traffic flows down a particular path.
18
1 The original IP that designed when it was originally
2 designed was designed to deal with adverse events. The
3 colloquial story is it was designed to deal with atomic war
4 which is an adverse event. And --
5 JUDGE DALZELL: I think we can agree on that.
6 (Laughter.)
7 THE WITNESS: And so the ability for IP to survive
8 that kind of environment, the kind of hostile environment we
9 felt was very important to maintain, Datagram mode means that
10 the individual units of the data that move over the network
11 which are packets have full identify-- source identifiers and
12 destination identifiers in each packet and are separately
13 routed, separately handled by the computers which comprise
14 the network, therefore being resilient to individual failure.
15 JUDGE DALZELL: And that is -- but that is not
16 subject to change right now, that's not in the NG, the IPNG?
17 THE WITNESS: We specifically, specifically chose to
18 require the support for Datagram mode in IPNG.
19 JUDGE DALZELL: Thank you. Sorry to interrupt.
20 BY MR. BARON:
21 Q Mr. Bradner, are all IETF documents public?
22 A It is a -- it is a matter of pride and honor in the IETF
23 that all documents are public documents available for free
24 over the net. We used the paradigm to develop the paradigm.
25 Q And that includes all RFC drafts or proposals for
19
1 standards, right?
2 A That is correct, they are called Internet Drafts and they
3 are publicly available.
4 Q And they're put up on web sites and are available to the
5 world at large, correct?
6 A That is correct.
7 Q Can we pause here and define what a URL is for the Court?
8 A URL is a term which means Uniform Resource Locator, a
9 pointer. It's the best -- the best way to identi-- to
10 consider it is it's sort of like a combination of all of the
11 things you might have in a phone directory listing,
12 somebody's name and address, and it is where something is on
13 the Net, not relative to you but in an absolute sense.
14 You don't go three buildings over to the left and
15 two stores down, it is here is the absolute location of
16 something ir-- independent of where you happen to be sitting
17 in the network.
18 Q For the IETF itself, am I correct that the URL is
19 something known as HTTP://WWW.EFF.ORG?
20 A That is incorrect.
21 Q Oh.
22 A Now, I'm sure that --
23 Q Please correct me.
24 A -- you -- you meant that to be incorrect.
25 Q Oh, I see, yes, no, I'm sorry, I -- I did not have the
20
1 right URL. Why don't you give the right URL?
2 A HTTT -- HTTP://WWW.IETF.ORD.
3 MR. BARON: Yes, your Honors, I think I've been
4 reading the EFF site on the Web too much.
5 BY MR. BARON:
6 Q Okay. Could you explain what these domains in that URL
7 represent for the IETF URL?
8 A The -- the part which is relative to the IETF is the
9 WWW.IETF.ORD. The part which precedes that, HTTP, is the
10 protocol, the function in which one should retrieve, should
11 access this site. Different options there are, for example,
12 FTP for File Transfer Protocol or Gofer, are different kinds
13 of concepts, different kinds of application programs to use
14 to access this site.
15 In this particular case where you can access that
16 particular site with FTP with anonymous FTP or with the Web,
17 WWW, the URL you specified is one which is using the Web to
18 access this site.
19 Q What's the difference between the current IP Version Four
20 and the Next Generation Version Six of the protocol?
21 A How much detail would you like that answer in?
22 Q Oh, just -- just sort of a summary for the Court.
23 A The reason to undertake the effort, and it was some
24 significant effort to develop a new generation for IP
25 revolved around three basic issues:
21
1 The first issue was that the IP address itself which
2 is the field, I mentioned in the packets themselves there is
3 this source identifier and a destination identifier, a source
4 address and a destination address. In IP Version Four which
5 is the current version, those fields are 32 bits long, each
6 of which could in theory identify four billion individual
7 posts or computers on the Network, but because of address
8 assignment inefficiency we're beginning to run out of those
9 and we're beginning to run out at a rate which caused a great
10 deal of consternation, particularly in the press back in the
11 early 90's, '92 and '93, that investment in IP was probably
12 not a good idea because we were running out of addresses.
13 It's like going to the phone company and saying I'd like a
14 phone and they say they don't have a number.
15 So the first thing was to try and fix the problem of
16 running out of addresses. The second thing was to try and
17 fix the problem of that there was too much routing
18 information, this is the information within the computers
19 that tie the Internet together, they're called routers,
20 they're special purpose computers. And in each one of those
21 computers in the backbone, in the more central locations
22 within the network must keep track of where every network in
23 the world is, every -- the network which is the one which
24 connects this computer here has to be kept track of by those
25 computers and the routers in the backbone.
22
1 The size of the routing table, the size of that
2 information was growing faster than memory technology,
3 doubling every nine to ten months and memory technology was
4 doubling every 11 to 24 months and in the long run those two
5 lines will never intersect. And so we had to do something.
6 JUDGE DALZELL: Excuse me, it's doubling every nine
7 to twelve months?
8 THE WITNESS: In nine --
9 JUDGE DALZELL: It's doubling every nine to --
10 THE WITNESS: The size of the Internet, yes.
11 JUDGE DALZELL: Nine to twelve months?
12 THE WITNESS: Yes. It's been tending towards the
13 nine month area of doubling.
14 And then the third area was want to be able to deal
15 with improving some aspects of the current Internet, security
16 aspects, real time or flow control or quality of service
17 metrics and things like that, so those were the three areas
18 which we were focusing on.
19 In the first area the IP Version Four address, as I
20 said, is 32 bits long. The IP Version Six which is what IP
21 Next Generation is, is 128 bits long. Now, that's four times
22 the number of bits, but that's actually four billion times
23 four billion times four billion times the number of hosts.
24 That turns out to be a very large number, yet somebody
25 estimated that even under the absolute worst efficiency, the
23
1 least efficient method of allocating them it still works out
2 to 1500 computers per square meter of the earth's surface,
3 including the oceans.
4 (Laughter.)
5 THE WITNESS: We think that we have -- we think that
6 we have aimed for the future in the expandability of this.
7 (Laughter.)
8 BY MR. BARON:
9 Q Sounds like a pervasive number of bits.
10 A Okay. The second, the second area was dealing with the
11 routing table space and we've made the addresses aggregatable
12 so that instead of having to articulate and list every
13 individual network, you can list a group of networks together
14 as one entry and this allows us to summarize the information
15 so that we don't have as many entries.
16 And then the third one, which was the other aspects,
17 we've identified some strong security mechanisms and we have
18 a field in the packet header which will allow future use for
19 flow control, quality of service and metrics of that type.
20 JUDGE SLOVITER: Could I ask a lay question, very
21 basic? If you go to this four times as many bits is it going
22 to increase four times everybody's address?
23 THE WITNESS: The -- that's a very good question and
24 actually that's something that a lot of people get confused.
25 There are two ways that you look at addresses on the
24
1 Internet. One is that bit pattern, currently the 32 bits, so
2 the address of the computer sitting on my desk at Harvard is
3 128.103.65.15. Now, I don't expect you to remember that, I'm
4 surprised that I do most of the time.
5 JUDGE SLOVITER: And I don't intend to write to you
6 that way cause I wouldn't know how.
7 (Laughter.)
8 THE WITNESS: Thank you. It's now in the record so
9 you could look it up, but that's not the way that you should
10 know about my computer. You should know about my computer by
11 using its what is called domain name, which is a people
12 friendly name, and that name is NEWDEV, as in the New
13 Development Machine, dot Harvard dot EDU. As long as you're
14 using that what is called the domain name, the size of the
15 actual address, the number of bits in the address is not
16 reflected back to something that the user has to deal with.
17 I would not want to try to remember the 128 bit version of
18 what my -- my computer's address is, but the domain name,
19 NEWDEV.Harvard.EDU will remain the same.
20 JUDGE SLOVITER: Thank you.
21 Sorry.
22 BY MR. BARON:
23 Q Mr. Bradner, you also said on something called the IESG,
24 the Internet Engineering Steering Group, correct?
25 A That is correct.
25
1 Q You've -- this is the Standards Approval Board of the
2 IETF, correct?
3 A That is correct.
4 Q Take us through, very briefly, if you would, the
5 standards track in terms of the three stages of standards,
6 proposed, draft and full?
7 A Actually, I would like to start a little bit before that.
8 All documents which are going to be proposed for
9 consideration for standardization within the IETF must first
10 appear as one of the Internet drafts that you mentioned
11 earlier that are publicly available ideas. And so somebody
12 who wishes to, somebody or some working group or some group
13 of individuals who wish to make a standard or have a document
14 considered to be a -- for standardization creates a Internet
15 draft. Usually that is the product of a working group or is
16 that, you know, a working group is formed to look at that
17 proposal, but not always.
18 After working group consideration, the working group
19 chair would propose to the area director within the area that
20 this document be considered by the IESG for the standards
21 process, for the standards track.
22 The first step, the IESG then reviews that and does
23 an internal vote and approves or does not approve of the
24 document based on its technical quality, its clarity and all
25 of the other things that one should consider when approving a
26
1 standard.
2 The first step in the standards process is, as you
3 mentioned, the proposed standard status. A proposed standard
4 is a document which is felt to be useful, i.e. has a
5 constituency usually within a working group and within the
6 IETF itself, and that constituency believes that this is of
7 value to the community and that it has no known errors, no
8 known flaws. If something is discovered in the process of
9 evaluation by the IESG or the working group which is a flaw,
10 then it should be returned to the working group and reworked.
11 Six months after a document has been approved as a
12 proposed standard it can then be considered for being a draft
13 standard. To achieve draft standard status, a document, a
14 specification must have multiple interoperable
15 implementations, you know, it's got to be proven to work, and
16 it's got to -- all of the individual aspects of it have to be
17 proven to work, all of the individual functions have to have
18 been shown to be implemented and interoperable.
19 This is unlike some other standards bodies which
20 just say this is a good idea and it's a better idea now than
21 it used to be because we've thought about it longer.
22 JUDGE SLOVITER: Could you give us an example?
23 Bring us down to earth, give us an example of a standard like
24 a proposed standard. What are we talking about?
25 THE WITNESS: A proposed standard, for example --
27
1 JUDGE SLOVITER: Yes.
2 THE WITNESS: -- an example of one is in the IE --
3 in the Inter-- in the IET -- IP Next Generation there is a
4 proposed standard which is the basic packet format and how
5 that packet is handled by routers as it goes through the
6 network. It defines the fields in the packet, the 128-bit
7 addresses, what routers do when they encounter this packet,
8 how they process it, all of that kind of aspect, all of those
9 aspects surrounding defining a packet of IP Version Six IP
10 Next Generation and how to move it through the network are
11 part of a proposed standard.
12 Another proposed standard would be -- well, a full
13 standard is Telnet which is a, Telnet is the remote access
14 protocol where you -- I can sit at this machine here and log
15 into as if I were local to my computer sitting back on my
16 desk at Harvard and that's a standard.
17 So a proposed standard is: we think this is a good
18 idea, we don't see any problems with it; draft standard is
19 people have implemented it and it works and we don't see any
20 problems with it still and more than one is implemented and
21 they interoperate. And then four months after a document has
22 been approved as a proposed standard, it can then be
23 considered for full standard and full standard has to have
24 the same implementation rules but it also has to be proven
28
1 that people want to use it so that there is significant
2 deployment. So we don't make something a full standard
3 unless people are going to use it.
4 BY MR. BARON:
5 Q It is true, is it not, that apart from the IETF and the
6 IESG, that there are other standards for the Internet that
7 come from submissions by outside individuals or groups,
8 correct?
9 A There are, there are a number of bodies who make
10 specifications, most of them call them specifications for
11 some minutiae of legal ease that I don't quite understand,
12 rather than standards. A number of --
13 JUDGE SLOVITER: Now you know how people feel if
14 they don't quite understand when somebody says something. Go
15 ahead.
16 (Laughter.)
17 THE WITNESS: I fully do understand, actually. I am
18 a fish out of water here, so...
19 There are many bodies who purport to make standards
20 or specifications that are for use on the Internet. The IETF
21 is the longest established of these and the one which has the
22 most international flavor and the one which is the, well, I
23 think anyway, since I'm a member of it, has the most
24 credibility as an open forum for development of standards.
25 We allow literally anybody who wants to participate.
29
1 Many of the other groups have a membership mechanism
2 where somebody purchases a membership or pays a membership
3 fee and at the access to the standards either during
4 development or when they're done are restricted, you have to
5 pay for them. But there are a dozen or more different groups
6 developing specifications for protocols to be used over the
7 Internet, those groups are open, large consortia such as the
8 W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, or very focused ones such
9 as the Master Card and Visa just announced a payments
10 protocol to encrypt credit cards over the Net, and that is a
11 small consortium and they have come up with a standard.
12 And so there's a wide range of standards. Things in
13 the Internet as in things in real life are standards only in
14 the extent that people actually use what you've done. We can
15 create something we say is a standard and if nobody uses it,
16 well, we're whistling in the wind but it's not really a
17 standard unless people use it.
18 So the Web itself is something which did not develop
19 out of the IETF standards process, it developed out of
20 scientists wanting to avail the technology for use in over
21 the Internet and this was -- this was developed outside the
22 IETF, though now there's an activity within the IETF to
23 codify and clarify the Web standards, the HTTP Standards.
24 But, yes, there are many standards processes.
25 BY MR. BARON:
30
1 Q There are 53 or so full standards that have made it
2 through this process?
3 A Over the years, yes.
4 Q These are common protocols --
5 A Something around that number.
6 Q These are common protocols in widespread use on the
7 Internet, correct?
8 A They were at the time they were adopted. Not all of them
9 are still in widespread use, some of them are quite historic.
10 Q And there are some two dozen draft standards in the
11 works, correct?
12 A Somewhere around that number, yes.
13 Q And about two or three more dozen proposed standards,
14 correct?
15 A That is correct.
16 MR. BARON: Your Honors, I'm going to, with the
17 Court's indulgence, approach the witness and provide him with
18 an exhibit. We have provided --
19 JUDGE DALZELL: It's in our binder?
20 MR. BARON: They're in black binders.
21 JUDGE DALZELL: In the black binder.
22 MR. BARON: In the Defendant's Exhibits 1 through
23 45, for the Court. I will hand the witness a volume as well.
24 JUDGE SLOVITER: And this is going to illustrate
25 everything he just said in black and white?
31
1 (Laughter.)
2 THE WITNESS: In a little bit more detail, I think.
3 JUDGE DALZELL: Which exhibit is this again?
4 BY MR. BARON:
5 Q I wanted to turn to Exhibit 6, Mr. Bradner, I wanted to
6 give a concrete example of something that the IETF is working
7 on. You're familiar with this document, Mr. Bradner?
8 A Make sure we're on the same page. This is --
9 Q It's --
10 A -- the charter for the address auto configuration working
11 group?
12 Q That's correct, marked as Defendant's Exhibit 6?
13 A Yes.
14 Q Your name appears on the first page of the document,
15 correct?
16 A That is correct.
17 Q Could you explain how this document which is with title
18 "Address Auto Configuration" will help unsophisticated
19 computer purchases -- purchasers like myself to essentially
20 plug and play when they buy computers?
21 A The document itself won't help you a great deal.
22 Q Okay.
23 A But the -- this is, the document is a charter for a
24 working group within the IETF, within the IP Next Generation
25 area which is designed for to allow computers when they're
32
1 taken out of a shipping carton and plugged into the wall to
2 come up with that globally unique 128-bit address so that you
3 don't have to type it in. You thought that remembering was
4 bad, defining the right one and typing it was going to be
5 awful. So this is a mechanism by which the computer can
6 figure out a globally useful unique address and work with
7 other technologies, particularly what is called Dynamic Host
8 Configuration Protocol which is a way where a central
9 administrator can control what address some particular
10 computer gets. This is one of the activities of the IP Next
11 Generation area.
12 Q If I could re-formulate that, in other words, an
13 individual does not have to obtain an IP address from some
14 central source like Internet but an auto configuration will
15 assign a globally unique address, correct?
16 A It will assign a globally unique address but within
17 constraints of and a range of addresses which has been
18 provided from some central source, either directly or
19 indirectly. It doesn't just go pick a number out of the air,
20 it says that this network, this physical wire can have
21 addresses 1 through 99 within this sub, sub-grouping of
22 addresses and it will pick the one within that sub-group
23 which uniquely identifies this machine but it does not affect
24 what is called the high order bits or the more -- the more
25 general part of the address which is supplied to it from a
33
1 router on the local network, a computer on the local network.
2 Q Am I correct in saying that each IP address is unique on
3 earth?
4 A That is incorrect.
5 Q Let me, maybe I misphrased something from your deposition
6 in the last week, let me quote from Page 55, Line 18. I'd be
7 happy to supply the witness with a copy of the deposition
8 transcript.
9 A You can read it and --
10 JUDGE SLOVITER: Would you like the written
11 deposition?
12 THE WITNESS: Well, why doesn't he read it, if I'm
13 still confused then I'll ask for a copy.
14 BY MR. BARON:
15 Q I asked a question that went: Question: "In lay
16 person's terms it would mean that a person such as myself who
17 may have difficulty loading in software or loading in
18 whatever is required to put a computer -- to get it to go
19 would have an easier time."
20 You answered at some length, but at one paragraph
21 you said "It will negotiate over the network for an address
22 automatically and" -- here's the key section -- "assign an
23 address which is globally unique and will uniquely locate
24 this computer on the global Internet."
25 Did I misstate the point?
34
1 A Your question was whether every IP address in the world
2 is unique and the answer is no. The -- the answer to the
3 question on the address auto configuration is if the address
4 auto, the node which is being configured is part of a
5 network, part of a network which is directly connected on the
6 Internet, then, yes, it will come up with a globally unique
7 address. But there are very many, thousands and thousands of
8 networks which are not connected to the global Internet and
9 they are using addresses which may be the same as somebody
10 else on the global Internet but it doesn't make any
11 difference because they're not part of the same picture.
12 And then there's a whole 'nother class which is
13 getting increasingly common where an organization such as a
14 university or a corporation, more likely a corporation, picks
15 addresses which are convenient to it and then has what is
16 called a fire wall between itself and the rest of the
17 Internet and that fire wall translates the addresses which
18 are local within its own corporation to addresses which are
19 unique on the internet, but it does so not one address per
20 node within the corporation but one address per speaker.
21 So if I am -- want to just talk within the
22 corporation, I never get an address which is unique on the
23 Internet. If I want to go out and make a connection out on
24 the Internet then I will be assigned the next address in the
25 row of the ones available that are unique on the Internet.
35
1 Normally there are very much fewer addresses on the window of
2 the Internet than there are inside the corporation and the
3 addresses on the window are reassigned by dynamically every
4 time somebody connects and disconnects, makes a section
5 through this fire wall and disconnects. This is because of
6 the pressure of addresses on the Internet, we are still in a
7 situation where the 32 bit IP Version Four address is under
8 some stress in terms of availability, so in order to make it
9 easier on corporations which may have very large internal
10 networks but may not be able to obtain an address, a globally
11 unique address, routable, globally unique address for every
12 one of their internal nodes, they get a small subsection,
13 maybe 500, maybe a thousand addresses which are reachable all
14 over the Internet to deal with the 100,000 internal
15 computers. It just means they can only have a thousand
16 communications going on at once.
17 JUDGE SLOVITER: Let me ask, could I follow that
18 through? I had a question on that as I read his original
19 affidavit. Let me give you an example and see if it has any
20 relevance to this.
21 The Federal Courts, the whole Federal Court system
22 is in this circuit interconnected on what we call CC Mail and
23 is in the process of becoming interconnected with Federal
24 Courts throughout the country. But it's not currently on the
25 Internet for various reasons, although there may be, I
36
1 believe, several Internet addresses or -- I'm not sure that's
2 the right technical way to put it -- that Courts or libraries
3 within the Federal Court system are getting so that they can
4 get the information available generally without compromising
5 the security of the Federal Court communications.
6 Now, is there a fire wall between -- is fire wall
7 the right term that insulates the Federal Courts from the
8 rest of the Internet?
9 THE WITNESS: It could be and isn't necessarily, it
10 could be simply that you have E-mail gateways such that
11 Electronic Mail, and CC Mail is a product name, by the way.
12 JUDGE SLOVITER: Mm-hmm.
13 THE WITNESS: That Electronic Mail and CC Mail goes
14 to a computer which then reconverts it from the CC Mail
15 format into the Internet format so it can be forwarded out on
16 the Internet. And then E-mail from the outside world can be
17 reformatted and forwarded inside, without having the ability,
18 for example, as I said Telnet, I could Telnet from here to my
19 desk at Harvard. Without have-- the E-mail gateway would not
20 permit the passage of Telnet packets so that somebody from
21 outside couldn't try and connect up and use one of the
22 internal court machines.
23 So there are different ways to get that isolation.
24 Fire Walls is one of them, Application Gateways is another
25 one. The modern Fire Walls tend to be Application Gateways
37
1 built into a single box, a number of different application
2 gateways, a Telnet Gateway, an FDP Gateway, a Web Gateway,
3 and an E-mail Gateway all built into the same box and many of
4 them do this address translation.
5 In your case it's more likely, speaking just as a
6 general indication, that the addresses inside are not even
7 translated to addresses outside, that the message is received
8 by the Gateway and retransmitted as if it were an entirely
9 new message using the address of the Gateway when it's going
10 out on the Internet, nothing related to the individual source
11 node where the message came from.
12 JUDGE SLOVITER: And there would be then, is it
13 correct that if you use such a gateway or whatever the
14 communication process is, there would be no way outside to
15 know what's really -- what's coming in inside or where it's
16 going inside?
17 THE WITNESS: That -- that actually is a key point.
18 We don't -- the Fire-- one of the aspects of Fire Walls is to
19 try and protect the knowledge of the structure of the inside
20 network from the outside, it's to hide the inside structure.
21 So from the outside, if I have an -- if I had your E-mail
22 address, I could send you E-mail but I wouldn't know how that
23 would get to you once it got past this gateway. I wouldn't
24 know, wouldn't be able to determine from the outside anything
25 to do with the structure of the Court network nor what
38
1 computers were there, where you read your E-mail or anything.
2 It's one of the functions of Gateways is to protect the
3 internal structure from visibility.
4 JUDGE SLOVITER: So then it has at least two
5 objects. One is because there are a multiplying number of
6 addresses and there are just or may not be enough addresses
7 and the other or many others are for other purposes?
8 THE WITNESS: Yes.
9 JUDGE SLOVITER: Okay.
10 BY MR. BARON:
11 Q Just a couple more questions on standards. You would
12 agree that a number of organizations are responsible for the
13 development of communications and operational standards and
14 protocols used on the Internet, correct?
15 A A number of organizations believe they are, yes.
16 Q The Internet wouldn't exist today as we know it without
17 some standards or some rules of the road, correct?
18 A That is correct.
19 Q And you recall saying in your deposition to me that we
20 are in a, quote, "standards development rich environment,"
21 unquote, on the Internet and you stand by that?
22 A Yes, or sit by it or whatever.
23 Q You stated in your supplemental declaration that you
24 have, quote, "A complete understanding of how communications
25 are accomplished on the Internet today, including
39
1 communications such as E-mail use, Net and World Wide Web,"
2 correct? Why don't we break down the Internet and start with
3 World Wide Web since most of the plaintiffs in this case in
4 the lawsuit have Web pages.
5 Mr. Bradner, can you describe for the Court what the
6 World Wide Web is?
7 A The World Wide Web is basically two things: it's the URL
8 that you mentioned earlier which is a pointer, a way to -- a
9 way to identify a particular location and piece of
10 information within that location on the Net and software that
11 interprets those pointers and goes off and retrieves the
12 documents that's been referenced by the URL.
13 Q You testified at your deposition last Friday and I'm
14 paraphrasing this, but correct me if I misstate something,
15 that the World Wide Web is a concept more than anything else,
16 it is comprised of a number of servers which can provide
17 information about requests in the same general concept as
18 other servers, new servers, FTP servers and the like and a
19 descriptive language which allows you to embed in a piece of
20 text locators defined to point to other documents.
21 Is that a good statement?
22 A The World Wide Web uses a --
23 JUDGE DALZELL: You have to say yes or no so they
24 can get that.
25 THE WITNESS: Oh, yes, sorry. Yes.
40
1 MR. BARON: Thank you.
2 BY MR. BARON:
3 Q The World Wide Web uses a graphical user interface,
4 correct?
5 A The -- the World Wide Web client applications that I have
6 seen use a graphical user interface.
7 Q Why don't you describe for the Court what a graphical
8 user interface is?
9 A The early computer interfaces tended to be character
10 lined, lined character type interfaces where you typed words
11 and commands like if you've used DOS, it's a DOS interface,
12 it's where your view of the Net or your view of the command
13 into the computer is one which is a character stream, you
14 type in words with varying degrees of meaningfulness and
15 asking it to do something.
16 A graphical user interface tends to be a full screen
17 application where you have a -- an ability to, with a mouse
18 or with cursor, those little arrow keys on the keyboard,
19 locate something on the screen and tell it to activate a
20 program or to fetch a file or do something because you're
21 selecting something on the keyboard -- something on the
22 screen, rather than typing the name of something in on the
23 keyboard.
24 Q The graphical user interface was designed to be user
25 friendly, correct?
41
1 A The hope of the designers of graphical user interfaces is
2 that they're user friendly. The definition of "user" and
3 "friendly" are to the mind of the beholder.
4 (Laughter.)
5 Q In fact, the Web's user interface was designed to allow
6 people with a wide variety of computer skills, indeed even
7 with some -- some with minimal computer skills to access vast
8 quantities of information, correct?
9 A That is correct.
10 Q And the language for creating Web pages on the World Wide
11 Web was designed in a way that makes pages easy to write,
12 makes it easy to put up pages on servers and makes it easy to
13 distribute information around the world, correct?
14 A That is -- that was the statement of the people who
15 designed the language but I do notice that many of the books
16 on HTTP which is this language tend to be in the one to two-
17 inch or three-inch thick variety. So again this might, it
18 somewhat depends on one's interpretation of the word "easy."
19 Q HTTP or HTML?
20 A Oh, HTML, sorry. Right. I get those --
21 Q You stated last week in your deposition --
22 JUDGE DALZELL: HTML.
23 MR. BARON: That was going to be my next question,
24 your Honor.
25 BY MR. BARON:
42
1 Q Why don't you state for the Court what HTML is?
2 A Hypertext Markup Language or something of that general
3 ilk. There's --
4 Q Were --
5 A There's too many acronyms in this business.
6 JUDGE DALZELL: May I be the first to agree with
7 you?
8 (Laughter.)
9 JUDGE SLOVITER: And I'll be the second.
10 MR. BARON: We're going to get to HTML, Judge
11 Dalzell.
12 BY MR. BARON:
13 Q You stated last week in your deposition that you've
14 looked at thousands of Web pages and that there are probably
15 tens of thousands of Web pages in existence. That's correct,
16 right?
17 A Well, the tens of thousands would be a -- what I meant in
18 when we're speaking of that is there are tens of thousands of
19 locations where Web pages exist. The actual number of Web
20 pages in the sense of a screen image that you could retrieve
21 is certainly in the millions. I know I have on my own site
22 which is one server, one Web server with one home page, there
23 are thousands of screens that you can retrieve. So if you're
24 talking about Web pages in terms of images on a screen, then
25 there are millions of them.
43
1 Q Okay. Now, apart from individuals --
2 JUDGE DALZELL: Excuse me, you say you have a Web
3 page?
4 THE WITNESS: I have a Web server. One of the
5 things that I do at Harvard is to run a test lab which
6 examines the performance of routers and things like, network
7 devices like that. And I put all of the information that
8 I've gotten from this examination up on line for anybody to
9 take a look at and there is thousands of pages, mostly of
10 numbers and some of pictures of performance curves available
11 from the Web server which is running on the computer sitting
12 on my desk.
13 BY MR. BARON:
14 Q Apart from individuals, Mr. Bradner, it would be a fair
15 statement to say that organizations including commercial
16 organizations such as companies selling potato chips or
17 pencils or cars use the Web as a way to provide information,
18 correct?
19 A Correct.
20 Q And to sell their products, correct?
21 A At this point, more to provide information. In the
22 future, in the near future I trust, more will be in the
23 business of selling their products over the Internet. Right
24 now because of concerns of security and things of that
25 nature, few, relatively few companies are actually doing
44
1 retail over the Net, going and buying a bag of potato chips
2 over the Net is not something that is readily available today
3 although you can order a pizza if you happen to live in Santa
4 Clara, California. Delivery is a big problem if you're doing
5 it from here, but --
6 (Laughter.)
7 A -- that -- soon you'll be able to do that. So I'm just
8 nuancing on the word you use of selling because right at the
9 moment it's more providing information than it is selling.
10 JUDGE DALZELL: Because you can't close the sale?
11 THE WITNESS: Actually you can and you can by
12 putting your credit card number in and actually the credit
13 card transaction over the Internet today is more secure than
14 giving your credit card to the waitress at the local
15 restaurant, but there is a feeling that it is not as secure.
16 And so there aren't many --
17 JUDGE DALZELL: I thought there was a problem of
18 verification?
19 THE WITNESS: The -- it's the same --
20 JUDGE DALZELL: Or so we're told.
21 THE WITNESS: Well, it's the same level of problem
22 of verification as what happens when someone calls up and
23 orders something from L.L. Bean over the telephone. L.L. Bean
24 has to go through a process with which they call up the
25 credit card company and say is this a valid credit card.
45
1 JUDGE DALZELL: And is it not true that you still
2 have to go outside the Internet to do that process?
3 THE WITNESS: Today that is true. I would hope that
4 in the relatively near future --
5 JUDGE DALZELL: Defined as?
6 THE WITNESS: Well, Master Card and Visa did define
7 a language for moving of information about credit cards over
8 the Net, they said it would be, that this definition would be
9 available I think this month or next month. So in the next
10 six to nine months the function set to be able to send a
11 secure credit card to Master Card to ask whether it's a valid
12 card and whether the person has enough money to pay two
13 dollars or whatever your fee is going to be should be there,
14 but this is a projection rather than a statement from
15 knowledge of who is developing these.
16 JUDGE SLOVITER: How could phoning tell or assure
17 that it's a valid card? It might show or how can phoning
18 assure that X, that Judge Dalzell who gives the card number
19 is in fact Judge Dalzell rather than Judge Buckwalter?
20 THE WITNESS: Actually, it does not. And that's --
21 it does not now when you call up for one of these mail order
22 houses. They do it on a basis generally of two things. One
23 is that in general when you order something you order it,
24 particularly if it's going to be shipped to you, you order it
25 shipped to you so that in some cases like American Express,
46
1 if it's a valuable shipment, will verify it's being shipped
2 to the billing address. And if it's not being shipped to the
3 billing address, you have to call them up and tell them no,
4 this is a special case and I want it to go someplace else. I
5 know because I had to do that.
6 Other credit card just ship -- know because they
7 have the shipping address of where it's going to, they have
8 an audit trail so in case somebody protests that this wasn't,
9 it wasn't me who placed this order, they can then do some
10 kind of tracking to try and figure out who it was who placed
11 the order. And the same thing would be true over the
12 Internet.
13 JUDGE SLOVITER: But would that be time consuming or
14 now that we have computers could that be easy and
15 instantaneous?
16 THE WITNESS: Well, in a real way ordering something
17 over the Internet over ordering something from a mail order
18 house over the telephone isn't going to change any of the
19 mechanisms involved other than how do you do it. You sit
20 there with a Web page and do some clicking on with your mouse
21 versus you call up on the telephone and tell the nice person
22 who answers the phone that you want an item on Page 67.
23 The rest of this, what happens behind the scenes,
24 works the same way today. There will be an increase in
25 efficiency when the verification process for verifying the
47
1 card, instead of requiring a separate communication normally
2 by a phone line with Master Card or Visa or American Express
3 could be done with electronic communication over the
4 Internet.
5 That will be a change in efficiency, but it doesn't
6 change the basic functionality which is they're depending on
7 you or your knowledge of the credit card number as your
8 identifier to identify yourself and the fact that they can
9 trace where the order was sent to as sort of a second guess
10 to figure out what happened when something goes awry.
11 BY MR. BARON:
12 Q Putting aside actually ordering merchandise by use of a
13 verified credit card via the Internet, it's certainly true,
14 isn't it the case that both individuals and companies can
15 have Web pages and that have a phone number on them or an 800
16 number or a toll free number for people to call to buy things
17 that they see advertised on the Net, isn't that correct?
18 A Yes, that is true.
19 Q Okay. Before we get into what individuals and nonprofit
20 organizations other than corporations can or cannot do, let's
21 talk about some technical matters including some --
22 JUDGE SLOVITER: You mean we haven't been?
23 (Laughter.)
24 MR. BARON: Some more technical matters.
25 BY MR. BARON:
48
1 Q Including some descriptive language used for the World
2 Wide Web. Mr. Bradner, could you tell the Court what a Web
3 server is?
4 A A Web server, a server in general in computer jargon is
5 software which is running on a computer which is waiting
6 patiently for a command to be sent to it over a network and
7 that command, if it's an FTP server, it would be an FTP
8 command, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. If it's a
9 server which returns phone numbers it's going to be a phone
10 number query. If it's a database server, so lots of
11 different servers, they have the same basic function which is
12 just software running in the computer waiting for a query.
13 A Web server is one which is waiting for a query
14 which is in -- over the Net which is formed in Webese, in the
15 right format for a Web query.
16 Q You told me last week that the World Wide Web is sewn
17 together with URL's, is that a fair statement?
18 A Yes. Sorry.
19 Q Now, on a particular Web page there can be pointers to
20 other pages on the Web, correct?
21 A Those are the URL's of which we were just speaking.
22 Q And the pointers -- all right, they can be pointers to
23 other URL's. And Web pages can also have --
24 A The pointers are the URL's.
25 Q Oh, the pointers are the URL's, okay, I stand corrected.
49
1 Web pages can also have pointers to files which contain audio
2 or sound, correct?
3 A That is correct.
4 Q In fact, Web pages can contain pointers to files in any
5 one of a number of forms containing any one of a number of
6 things such as text, sounds, still graphics or motion
7 graphics, correct?
8 A That is correct.
9 Q One can take a home movie on a Camcorder and digitize it
10 and transpose it in a way that would be viewable by clicking
11 on a pointer on a Web page, correct?
12 A Assuming that the person who had the client who had the
13 Web browser had the right software installed which allowed
14 them to download and then view motion graphics and assuming
15 that the motion graphics were stored in a format compatible
16 with the browser that the individual had. Both of those are
17 not assumptions you can make a hundred percent, but still
18 given that qualification, yes.
19 Q Could you tell the Court what a browser is?
20 A A browser is the jargon term for a Web client. The
21 client is the software running on a user's computer to access
22 some server and a Web browser is the software running on the
23 user's computer to access a Web server.
24 Q And what is a search engine?
25 A A search engine in this -- in the context of the Web is a
50
1 piece of software which, when given a query, it's a database
2 query responder, it's a server for database queries, it --
3 you give it some information about something that you wish to
4 find and it goes to its database and tries to find it in that
5 database.
6 Search engines have fine degrees of sophistication
7 of ability to take just single words or words in context or
8 concepts in the sense of you can give some search engines a
9 piece of text, a newspaper article, and say this is
10 interesting to me, find other things that look like this.
11 And it's quite -- some of them are very sophisticated. They
12 look at their internal database to try and find other things,
13 other references in that database which are compatible with
14 the query that you gave it.
15 Q Let's get to the heart of things, Mr. Bradner, by
16 discussing something called HTML.
17 JUDGE SLOVITER: Before we do that maybe we should
18 let the witness have a break and we should all have a break.
19 Okay?
20 JUDGE DALZELL: I agree.
21 JUDGE SLOVITER: Ten minutes, I'm told.
22 THE COURT CLERK: Please rise.
23 (Court in recess; 10:40 to 10:55 o'clock a.m.)
24 JUDGE DALZELL: All right, Mr. Baron.
25 MR. BARON: Excuse me, your Honor, we were just
51
1 taking care of some housekeeping functions.
2 (Pause.)
3 BY MR. BARON:
4 Q Mr. Bradner, we were about to discuss HTML, could you
5 tell the Court what HTML is?
6 A It's a language, a descriptor language which is used to
7 define within a Web server how a document should appear on
8 the screen of the Web client, the browser.
9 Q Perhaps an example of HTML code would be helpful here.
10 Could you turn to Defendant's Exhibit that's marked 14 in the
11 black binder?
12 (Pause.)
13 Q Do you have that?
14 A Yes, I do.
15 Q Mr. Bradner, does this appear to you as the same exhibit
16 that I showed you at your deposition last Friday?
17 A Yes.
18 Q This represents the Worldwide Web home page of an
19 organization entitled Stop Prisoner Rape, which is one of the
20 plaintiffs in this lawsuit. And you will note -- and you
21 would agree, would you not, Mr. Bradner, that the first four
22 pages represent Web pages in their usual format and behind
23 those four pages is a series of pages which represent the
24 same text but in HTML code format, is that correct?
25 A That appears -- that is what it appears to be, yes.
52
1 Q Looking at the immediate page behind the usual format Web
2 pages, the top of the page says --
3 JUDGE SLOVITER: These aren't paginated, are they?
4 MR. BARON: No, they are not, your Honor.
5 (Discussion held off the record.)
6 JUDGE DALZELL: You're talking about the first page
7 following the conventional --
8 MR. BARON: That's correct, the --
9 JUDGE DALZELL: -- conventionally arranged text?
10 JUDGE SLOVITER: So, the one that says --
11 MR. BARON: That's correct and the --
12 JUDGE SLOVITER: That's right, okay.
13 MR. BARON: That's correct, your Honor.
14 BY MR. BARON:
15 Q You see the bracket HTML and bracket Head, correct, Mr.
16 Bradner?
17 A Yes.
18 Q The designation Head represents the head of this HTML
19 document, correct?
20 A Yes.
21 Q And you see the term Meta in the third and the fifth
22 line?
23 A Yes.
24 Q What does the Meta represent?
25 A As I said in my deposition and when we talked last
53
1 Friday, I did not and do not represent myself as an expert in
2 HTML. So, I would suggest that if you want to investigate
3 the details of HTML it would probably be better to ask
4 somebody who is.
5 Q But looking at it you're certainly more expert than I,
6 that the key words here are words that are in a field in a
7 Meta tag in the header, correct?
8 A Yes.
9 Q Okay. And there's a body to an HTML document, correct?
10 A Yes.
11 Q And down at the bottom of this page there is a reference
12 to a URL. The HTML source code includes references to
13 particular URL's as a usual course, correct?
14 A Most of them do, yes.
15 JUDGE SLOVITER: Oh --
16 JUDGE DALZELL: The very bottom, the very bottom.
17 MR. BARON: The very bottom of the page, your Honor,
18 it says "Bracket A-HREF equals," and then A-URL, which
19 represents another Web site.
20 THE WITNESS: Actually all you can tell about that,
21 URL, is that it represents a particular document someplace
22 which may or may not be on another site.
23 JUDGE SLOVITER: Where does it says URL?
24 JUDGE DALZELL: He said that is the URL.
25 JUDGE SLOVITER: Oh, okay.
54
1 BY MR. BARON:
2 Q Yes, that's a better description, Mr. Bradner. Now, in
3 your deposition last week you indicated that the type of
4 parental control rating scheme you preferred would be one in
5 which an individual's browser could be configured to send a
6 copy of a particular URL, including a URL in a document, to a
7 third-party rating service with a query to the rating
8 service, asking for information about the contents of the
9 URL, correct?
10 A Actually, to be very precise, about the contents of the
11 file or document pointed to by the URL.
12 Q Okay. Now, this would be one of the methodologies
13 suggested by the PICS scheme, P-I-C-S, which is a parental
14 control rating scheme being worked on by the W-3 consortium
15 located at MIT, correct?
16 A That's correct.
17 Q And that's the scheme that's embodied in Defendant's
18 Exhibit 15, if you could turn to that, the document which
19 says, "PICS: Internet access controls without censorship"?
20 A Yes, this is a document you showed me last week.
21 Q It is true, is it not, Mr. Bradner, that a browser under
22 this model of parental controls could look to the specific
23 header information in HTML source code for a tag or a label
24 that's put in the header by the content provider as part of
25 the overall rating scheme, isn't that correct?
55
1 A To be clear, you had just asked me about my preference
2 for a third-party rating service, it appears that you're
3 asking me now about PICS as a general concept, I just want to
4 be sure what it is that you're asking me.
5 Q Well, I'm asking PICS as a general concept.
6 A Okay. So, in PICS as a general concept you -- PICS
7 defines tags that you can place into a document, into the
8 header of a document, HTML document and other documents,
9 which can be used to convey information about the -- some
10 content of this document, that is correct.
11 Q And on Exhibit 15 at Page 6 of 9, at the bottom left-hand
12 corner, that's where the pages are identified, the second
13 full paragraph, if you would read along with me --
14 JUDGE BUCKWALTER: Well, where are you?
15 JUDGE DALZELL: Page 6 of 9.
16 MR. BARON: It's Exhibit 15 and it's Page 6 of 9,
17 you can see at the bottom left hand of the document.
18 BY MR. BARON:
19 Q I'm going to concentrate on the second full paragraph,
20 starting with "Since," the word, "Since." And the second
21 sentence says, "The first is to" -- the first methodology of
22 PICS, is that correct, Mr. Bradner?
23 A That's actually a third sentence.
24 Q Well, it says, "The first is to embed labels in HTML
25 documents. This method will be helpful for those who wish to
56
1 label content they have created." That's one of the
2 methodologies embodied in the PICS parental control rating
3 standard, correct?
4 A That's one of the -- that's one of the methods in their
5 proposal, yes.
6 Q Okay. Indeed, you believe that as a technical matter one
7 can embed a character stream which could be interpreted by
8 browsers or other software if it is so desired, correct?
9 A In certain documents, certain types of files and
10 documents that is correct, in other types of files and
11 documents it's incorrect.
12 Q Well, it's your view, is it not, Mr. Bradner, that as a
13 technical matter of ease or difficulty that it is trivial to
14 embed a tag or a label in HTML source code, correct?
15 A It's a matter of typing a few characters, so, yes, in
16 concept; in implementation, if you have thousands of pages of
17 source code then it might be a little difficult, but in
18 concept it's easy, you just type in the character string.
19 Q You told me last Friday in your deposition that for your
20 own Web site, your own Web pages, the home page it would be
21 trivial to embed a tag, you could do it in five minutes,
22 correct?
23 A Well, actually it's a little more -- I said a little bit
24 more than that. My current Web server I do not happen to
25 have a document which is a home page. The Web server points
57
1 to a part of my -- the directory tree in my computer and it
2 has automatically created a home page, because I haven't
3 gotten around to creating one myself. So, it would take more
4 than five minutes, because I would have to create the
5 document in which to embed the string before embedding the
6 string and I couldn't tell how long that would take, it would
7 depend on how anal I got and how pretty a picture I wanted on
8 it.
9 Q Well, you said at Page 223 of your deposition --
10 MR. BARON: -- I'd be happy at any appropriate point
11 to hand the witness the deposition if it will be --
12 JUDGE DALZELL: Whenever you want it, you just say
13 so.
14 MR. BARON: -- helpful for the record.
15 BY MR. BARON:
16 Q You said at Page 223, Line 8, "Certainly on my site it
17 would be trivial for me to do," correct?
18 A Once I created a home page it would be trivial for me to
19 do it, yes.
20 Q Could you turn to Defendant's Exhibit 16? This exhibit
21 is one that I showed you last week, correct?
22 A That's correct.
23 Q It's titled, "Safe Surf Internet Rating Standard," are
24 you familiar with Safe Surf?
25 A As to the extent that you showed it to me last week.
58
1 Q Okay. On the second page of this exhibit at the top, the
2 first full sentence says, "If a majority of them spent five
3 to ten minutes to implement the system by marking their site
4 then a child-safe Internet could be realized in a matter of
5 weeks." Do you see that statement?
6 A I see that statement.
7 Q And do you agree with it?
8 A No.
9 Q You could build PICS compatible software into existing
10 browsers, correct?
11 A One could, I wouldn't proclaim to be a good enough
12 programmer to in any particular case.
13 Q That's technically feasible, correct?
14 A That's correct.
15 Q Back to Exhibit 15, looking at the bottom of the Page 5
16 of 9 in the document. It's the page with blue Figure 4 at
17 the top, but I'm going to concentrate on the bottom of the
18 page. Do you see the sentence that starts, "Anything"?
19 A Yes, I do.
20 Q Let me read it to the record: "Anything that can be
21 named by a URL can be labeled, including resources that are
22 accessed via FTP, Gopher or Net News, as well as HTTP." You
23 agree, do you not, Mr. Bradner, that you may extend URL's to
24 provide labeling in some form across these applications on
25 the Internet, correct?
59
1 A To be very specific and concrete, you can extend the
2 format of URL's themselves to include additional information,
3 which could be used by a browser to decide on whether to
4 implement -- to instigate a particular application. You
5 would not actually do anything in the application itself, for
6 example FTP, you wouldn't modify FTP, you would modify the
7 browser to decide on whether or not to start up FTP based on
8 additional information in the URL.
9 JUDGE DALZELL: I want to get very concrete on this,
10 because it's an important issue. The Carnegie Library, Mr.
11 Croneberger is here for the Carnegie Library, it's card
12 catalogue is on line. Now, I take it the card catalogue is a
13 site, correct, it has a URL -- if I want to get to it it has
14 a URL, does it not?
15 THE WITNESS: The -- I can speak with knowledge
16 about the Harvard University College --
17 JUDGE DALZELL: All right, fine, take that.
18 THE WITNESS: -- Library. The Harvard University
19 College Library, which is called Holis (ph.), is available as
20 an interactive program. So that you would Telnet to a server
21 at Harvard and then it presents a screen wherein you can do
22 an author search or a title search or things like that.
23 JUDGE DALZELL: Well, what I'm getting at is what I
24 think Mr. Barn is asking you, is the idea here that Harvard
25 or the Carnegie Library would rate its card catalogue?
60
1 THE WITNESS: In the context of Harvard's, Harvard's
2 Holis system, what would have to happen is any place where
3 somebody referenced Harvard's Holis system, a URL which
4 referenced it, any place where that any URL existed the
5 reference Holis would have to be extended to include a rating
6 of Harvard's system.
7 JUDGE DALZELL: That's what I mean.
8 THE WITNESS: This wouldn't be Harvard rating it,
9 because Harvard isn't creating the URL's that might be placed
10 at Brown or at the National Library Association or any place
11 else, because that is a pointer to Harvard and it's the
12 pointer in this concept which is modified, not the site
13 itself. In this particular case you do not get to Harvard
14 -- the way you access Harvard doesn't give an interactive way
15 for a browser to ask Harvard what its PICS rating is.
16 JUDGE DALZELL: Well, then I'm not understanding
17 this at all. The PICS rating -- assume that everybody adopts
18 this PICS system, okay? Will the Harvard card catalogue
19 that's on line, will it be rated or will just subsets of it
20 be rated?
21 THE WITNESS: There --
22 JUDGE SLOVITER: And who has to do that rating?
23 JUDGE DALZELL: Exactly, and who has to do the
24 rating?
25 THE WITNESS: All right. I think using the Harvard
61
1 catalogue is exactly the kind of case where we can look at
2 it. The current technology, the current way the Harvard
3 catalogue is implemented is that you interact with the
4 Harvard catalogue with the same program that I would use to
5 interact with my computer sitting on my desk, which is
6 Telnet, it allows you to remotely be connected to that
7 computer and remotely interact with that computer as if you
8 were a local terminal; this is not a Web interface, it is a
9 local terminal interface. In that context Harvard has no way
10 of rating -- have no way of handing back a rating to anybody,
11 because what would have to happen instead is -- it's like you
12 would put ratings in T.V. Guide of T.V. shows, it's not that
13 the ratings are embedded in the shows, it's every place where
14 somebody pointed at Holis you would have to have that place
15 which did the pointing have the rating in it. So, Harvard
16 wouldn't have control over that.
17 JUDGE DALZELL: Yeah, but what I think Mr. Baron is
18 getting at is the feasibility of if you are going through a
19 card catalogue on line, which Mr. Croneberger describes in
20 detail in his declaration, would this marker be right next to
21 "Rebecca of Sullybrook Farm," and that's G rated, but then
22 when it has an Ice T lyric it would be NC-17?
23 THE WITNESS: Again --
24 JUDGE DALZELL: I'm not being facetious here.
25 THE WITNESS: No, no, I agree. Under the current
62
1 Harvard system we wouldn't be able to implement this, I'm
2 saying under the current Harvard system that the pointers are
3 outside of Harvard's jurisdiction because they're pointers to
4 Harvard, not pointers within Harvard. So, other people would
5 rate Harvard. Another interface to this -- the same facility
6 which does not currently exist, but could be made to exist,
7 would be a Web Browser-type of interface to the Harvard
8 College library system. In that case the browser could be
9 able to see a rating and the rating would be actually buried
10 in the URL, when you said Ice T the URL, which specified
11 where the file was if you're going to retrieve it, then that
12 URL, you could embed in that URL the PICS parental warning
13 symbol.
14 JUDGE DALZELL: But my point, and it's a very
15 important point to this case, is since we know at least at
16 the Carnegie Library, and I would think that's in the
17 Carnegie Library would be up at Harvard, that they have the
18 Ice T lyrics, is the whole card catalogue NC-17, to take the
19 MPAA rating --
20 THE WITNESS: In the --
21 JUDGE DALZELL: -- because there is some dirty words
22 there, in some people's view?
23 THE WITNESS: The question that I was asked a little
24 while ago, whether it was easy -- the statement in the
25 exhibit here of whether it was easy for everybody just to do
63
1 this, assumes the very assumption -- the question you just
2 asked, which is that, yes, Harvard would have to rate its
3 entire catalogue as questionable because of some references
4 within that catalogue. The effort to go through and rate
5 every individual reference within the catalogue -- Harvard's
6 -- Carnegie Mellon's catalogue is a subset of Harvard's, of
7 course --
8 (Laughter.)
9 THE WITNESS: -- it's some six or seven million
10 references in the Harvard catalogue, though I think on line
11 is three or four million at the moment, this would take
12 considerable effort to go through and --
13 JUDGE DALZELL: And rate them.
14 THE WITNESS: -- rate every single one of them.
15 JUDGE SLOVITER: If we started -- if nobody had ever
16 put Shakespeare into this -- ever at all put it into the
17 system and somebody, a third party or somebody else went
18 through Shakespeare before they did this and began to rate
19 Shakespeare plays, is there some feasible method where
20 anybody, any library that then have Shakespeare could absorb
21 that rating? Or if Judge Dalzell, who has a younger person,
22 unlike mine, who can read anything, but would he be able to
23 find some mechanism whether she or he, I don't know, looked
24 at Shakespeare, wherever it might be?
25 THE WITNESS: There's two aspects to that and
64
1 actually something I should clarify. On the Harvard College
2 Library this is the library card catalogue, not the materials
3 itself, there are other libraries with materials itself on
4 line. For example, I was researching for a column that I do
5 and I was looking up Flatland, which is a -- some of you may
6 have read that, it's from the late 1800's, it's about a world
7 of two dimensions --
8 JUDGE DALZELL: I read it in geometry.
9 THE WITNESS: Yes, well, you should read it at least
10 there. And I wanted to look at it, because I was going to do
11 a column which happened to be based on that. So, I did a Web
12 search and I came up with a site where the text for that book
13 was on line, and I went on off and I read it. And this was a
14 library which provided this, it's one of the university
15 libraries, I forget which one, where that material was on
16 line. And I think the questions you were asking are more
17 related to places where the material is on line --
18 JUDGE SLOVITER: Exactly.
19 THE WITNESS: -- rather than the Harvard University
20 catalogue, which is just saying, well, the rap songs are
21 available by going to the stacks and looking in Bin 3. So,
22 in the areas where the material is on line that's a much more
23 complex issue, that -- certainly the Harvard -- I don't think
24 the Harvard catalogue, the catalogue per se would be ever
25 considered verboten, but certainly some of the items within
65
1 that the catalogue references could be. There is a mechanism
2 where one in theory could do this. A lot of college
3 libraries, a lot of libraries in generally actually use
4 external sources when they create their card catalogue, they
5 send a list of titles to a commercial firm which has expanded
6 information about titles. So, you send -- you say I've got
7 Shakespeare's Hamlet and Edition 14, give a little bit more
8 information, they return to you the information block, which
9 includes the key words for use in searches and all of the
10 other information that you might want for your on-line
11 reference to this document, rather than you having to enter
12 all of this -- the individual university library having to
13 enter all of this information they go off to this third
14 party. And in theory that third party, if the rating has --
15 if a rating has been done that third party could include that
16 rating in that block of information that they return when the
17 university or other library says tell me about Shakespeare's
18 Hamlet, 1912 Edition from whatever.
19 BY MR. BARON:
20 Q Well, I'd like you to return, however, to the methodology
21 that I pointed you to in Defendant's Exhibit 15, which is
22 that one of the methodologies in PICS, is it not, to -- that
23 the content creator, the content provider embed the tag in
24 their document rather than a third-party rating organization,
25 correct?
66
1 A As I said before, that is a feasible and reasonable thing
2 to do for some document, it is not possible for others; it is
3 not possible for binary files, for executables, for example,
4 you can't embed something in there because it would destroy
5 the integrity of the file itself --
6 Q All right, but for --
7 A -- it would make the file itself useless.
8 Q But for the Web pages that represent, for example, the
9 Stop Prisoner Rape Web page, that doesn't have a binary or an
10 executable file, so far as you know?
11 A As far as I know. It could put at the top of the page --
12 embed in the HTML a coding, that is correct.
13 Q It is also technically feasible to tag a portion of a Web
14 site, correct?
15 A There is no -- in the Web there is nothing which -- there
16 is no structure which says this is a portion of a site and
17 this is not. Going back to your question earlier about the
18 URL that was at the bottom of the page, I made the point of
19 saying that this was a pointer to a file some place on some
20 server, there is nothing to say that this is structurally on
21 this server or any other server. So that if you are -- if
22 all of the access to some subsection of your disk is through
23 a particular home page and there are no URL's that exist any
24 place else in the world which have a more explicit pointing
25 down inside of a sub-subdirectory then, yes, if you put some
67
1 kind of labeling on the home page, on the first page of this
2 sub-tree you could imply something about the rest of the
3 tree. But that would only be making, again, the assumption
4 that nobody had a URL which pointed further down into that
5 tree, if they did they would never even look at that page,
6 they would go directly to the more specific document.
7 Q Well, I'm at a point where I think it's reasonable to
8 read a portion of your deposition last Friday and see if we
9 can seek clarification here, I'm at Page 222. Let me read
10 into the record --
11 MR. BARON: -- and, with the Courts' indulgence, I
12 think it would be appropriate to show the witness the
13 deposition.
14 (Pause.)
15 BY MR. BARON:
16 Q I'm at Page 222 and around Line 17.
17 MR. BARON: If the Court wishes, I have copies of
18 some format of the deposition, but I do intend to read a few
19 sentences here.
20 BY MR. BARON:
21 Q You're answering me and you say, the witness, this is at
22 222, Line 17: "I could make a label and I could see that
23 most people could make a label and what, for a lack of a
24 better term, home page for the site which in some way
25 characterized the contents of the site and do that quite
68
1 economically, yes. It gets a little more complicated, the
2 site is like a library site that are flat laying on board,
3 where the characterizations of the contents vary on a per-
4 file basis."
5 Going down to Line 8: "Certainly on my site it
6 would be trivial for me to do, once I got the software and
7 got everything else and got a sample page to put up it would
8 probably take me five minutes to do that after I got all of
9 the crap in line, a technical term."
10 Moving on to Line 14: "And so, yes, it would be
11 economically feasible if indeed somebody" --
12 MR. MORRIS: Your Honor, I would just ask that Mr.
13 Baron read the entire page, he is leaving out some important
14 points that -- and place the --
15 JUDGE DALZELL: Well, you can get that --
16 JUDGE SLOVITER: Well, you get cross-examination and
17 the witness has got the entire testimony in front of him.
18 MR. MORRIS: Okay, that's fine.
19 BY MR. BARON:
20 Q Continuing at Line 14: "And so, yes, it would be
21 economically feasible if indeed somebody were to distribute a
22 sample. Everything below here is fine file, putting that
23 into my environment would be actually quite easy to do." Is
24 that still your testimony, Mr. Bradner?
25 A Yes, and that -- and that's absolutely true and I think
69
1 that's what I just said. But it makes one assumption, which
2 I did not state when we talked last week which I did just
3 state, which is it makes the assumption that anybody
4 referencing my site would only have a reference to my, quote,
5 "home page," rather than a more explicitly reference to some
6 subsection point, which actually in my particular case I know
7 is not true. In my particular case some individual vendors
8 of equipment provide URL's pointing to their results, which
9 point down inside of my site, bypassing my home page and they
10 are saying, go and look at this file, which is underneath
11 this directory, underneath this directory, underneath this
12 directory, and go look at the results there. So, yes it is
13 true that I could modify a -- put in a home page, but that is
14 only effective if people look at -- are actually stopping at
15 the home page on the way to what they're looking for and that
16 may or may not be true.
17 Q The concept of coming up with some form of a standard way
18 to tag or label a warning sign is perfectly reasonable,
19 correct?
20 A Yes.
21 Q And it's technically possible, correct?
22 A Yes.
23 Q Assuming that there was software or browsers in the
24 marketplace that could read the tag or label in HTML source
25 code that Web site would be blocked, correct?
70
1 A Again, it would be blocked if indeed that particular Web
2 page was one that the browser referenced on its way to the
3 document that it was seeking. In my case, I included in my
4 news column a URL for Flatland and that URL specified the
5 file which is Flatland's home page, not the file which is the
6 home page of the library system itself. So, if I -- if
7 somebody used the URL that I provided in the column they
8 would bypass any home page of the entire site and would go
9 directly to the Flatland file and would not see any tags that
10 happen to a site-wide tag, because their browser would never
11 read that page.
12 Q You stated in your supplemental declaration filed on
13 Tuesday at Paragraph 79 that, quote, "To my knowledge no
14 Internet access software or Worldwide Web browsers are
15 currently configurable to block material with such tags." Do
16 you recall that statement?
17 A Yes, I do.
18 Q You stated in the deposition that, however, the Netscape
19 owns the lion's share of the browser market, around 80
20 percent of the market, correct?
21 A I think I stated that Netscape has stated that they own
22 80 percent of the market.
23 (Laughter.)
24 Q Last Friday --
25 JUDGE DALZELL: And they're not under oath.
71
1 (Laughter.)
2 BY MR. BARON:
3 Q Last Friday at your deposition I asked you specifically
4 how difficult would it be for Netscape to tweak its browser
5 to understand a tag or a label embedded in a header in HTML
6 that said adult, was in fact a site that was adult, and you
7 responded that, quote, "I certainly don't think it would be
8 an inordinate burden to do something of that form." You
9 stand by that statement?
10 A Yes.
11 Q You also agreed as a matter of technical feasibility that
12 Microsoft could do the same, correct?
13 A Yes.
14 Q And programs could be changed at AOL, Compuserve and
15 Prodigy to do the same, correct?
16 A Yes.
17 Q And Surf Watch and Cyber Patrol and the world of that --
18 of parental control software, they could change their
19 software programs to pick up the tags or labels, correct?
20 A They can pick -- they can -- software can be changed to
21 pick up the labels whenever they examine a page that has
22 labels in it.
23 Q Okay, we're going to leave tags and labels. Let's turn
24 to directories and registers in cyberspace, particularly on
25 the Web. You recall at your deposition that I asked you
72
1 whether you agreed with the statement that many people
2 believe there should be a white pages directory for the
3 Internet and you at least conceded that many people do
4 believe that, correct?
5 A Yes, that's correct, I conceded that.
6 Q Even if a comprehensive index to the net is impractical
7 in some sense you surely agree, do you not, Mr. Bradner, that
8 a white pages subset of cyberspace is technically feasible,
9 correct?
10 A It's more than technically feasible, there are a number
11 of organizations claiming they are providing just such a
12 thing.
13 Q In fact aren't there, as you said, many neutral places or
14 sites that exist where URL's can be picked up in a kind of
15 index or directory, correct?
16 A Neutral and non-neutral, yes.
17 Q Indeed, you told me last Friday that a URL is a URL is a
18 URL and that no technical issues are involved in creating
19 pages which list URL's, correct?
20 A That is correct. That actually is the point I was making
21 earlier, that if there is a URL pointing to a -- pointing to
22 the Harvard College Library that -- and we're making the
23 assumption that we're controlling access by putting PICS-type
24 tagging in the URL's, it's wherever that URL exists, whether
25 it's on Harvard-owned machines or anybody else's machine,
73
1 which is where that labeling would have to be done. And if
2 there is 10,000 places around the world which have URL's
3 pointing to Harvard, all of those 10,000 places would have to
4 rate -- would include the ratings for Harvard in their URL's,
5 it would not be under Harvard's control to make them do such
6 a thing.
7 Q Aside from indexes or directories, if you have content --
8 if you are a content provider and you have content you wish
9 to restrict, for whatever reason, you could call Surf Watch
10 or other parental-control products to let them know about
11 your site in cyberspace, correct?
12 A We had a long discussion of this last Friday and the
13 clear statement is yes, of course, I could call Surf Watch
14 and do so, but Surf Watch would have very little way of
15 knowing whether I had the authority to make a statement about
16 a particular site, they would have to have some ability to
17 resolve that this person had some relationship to the site
18 that was being spoken of. So, if I'm a do-gooder and wanted
19 to talk about some other site I may or may not have the
20 authority or maybe I'm just trying to be mean to somebody or
21 they are a competitor of mine, Surf Watch would have to go
22 through some mechanism to insure that I had the right to
23 speak of that site. So, in a true literal sense, sure, I
24 could call up Surf Watch and say the Reuter (ph.) vendors
25 think that the information about their products on my site is
74
1 dirty because it paints them in a bad light and you should
2 block that, I could do that, but I would suspect Surf Watch
3 would be a little curious as to why -- whether I had the
4 right to do that.
5 Q Well, I'm concentrating on the good-faith actions of
6 content providers and you have conceded that they could
7 certainly call Surf Watch -- you can E-mail Surf Watch,
8 right?
9 A I don't know their E-mail address, but I assume that
10 they're on the net --
11 Q You could fax --
12 A -- it would be silly if they were not.
13 Q You could fax Surf Watch?
14 A Again, I don't know their fax number, but I assume you
15 can.
16 Q You could hyperlink Surf Watch from your site, correct?
17 JUDGE SLOVITER: What would this -- let's get back
18 to the question and what would it say, if you faxed Surf
19 Watch what is your question, so we can --
20 MR. BARON: The question is whether a content
21 provider could take an affirmative action if they had a site
22 that they wished to block because of whatever reason, for
23 example, that it was not appropriate for minors, and they
24 wanted to inform the parental control software companies that
25 are out there, and Surf Watch is my example, could they take
75
1 an easy, simple action to E-mail, fax, telephone or hyperlink
2 that parental control software company to let them know that
3 the site in cyberspace exists, that's what these questions
4 are.
5 JUDGE DALZELL: And your answer is yes?
6 THE WITNESS: Except for the last one, hyperlink,
7 I'm not sure what he means by that.
8 BY MR. BARON:
9 Q You can just put a click on a Web site and click it to
10 the Surf Watch and they would -- it would be a link to them.
11 A That would bring up Surf Watch's home page, I'm not sure
12 what that would gain us.
13 Q All right. Well, putting that aside, wouldn't doing any
14 of these affirmative actions cure the reliability problems
15 that you yourself have stated with respect to Surf Watch?
16 A the reliability problems I believe that you're referring
17 to are where I said that there was a window of vulnerability,
18 if a primary method by which one of these blockers is working
19 is that you have a list of sites which is distributed at some
20 periodicity to update the local copy of the browser, there is
21 a window between the time that a site comes on line and the
22 time the site is discovered and the time that this update
23 occurs, there's a window of vulnerability wherein Surf Watch
24 wouldn't block a site that it otherwise would. And if indeed
25 there were some reliable methodology for getting a message to
76
1 Surf Watch indicating that this site is a funny site, and I'm
2 in control of this site and I tell you it's a funny site and
3 Surf Watch can verify that it's me and all that kind of
4 thing, then sure, this would allow the window of
5 vulnerability to be zero.
6 Q Let me just, because this is such an important point,
7 read you what you said last Friday in your deposition and
8 whether you would still agree, it's on Page 165, Line 10: "I
9 feel that there is some reliability problems in terms of
10 using an exclusion list," that's with respect to parental
11 control software, "keeping that exclusion list up to date is
12 the biggest issue. Until the exclusion systems that I have
13 seen are updated on a weekly or a monthly basis for their
14 exclusion lists, and new sites are being generated all the
15 time, and between the time when a new site is generated and
16 the time the exclusion list update comes in there is a period
17 of vulnerability," that's the period you're speaking to
18 today, correct?
19 A Yes.
20 Q Okay.
21 JUDGE SLOVITER: But the technical feasibility is
22 there?
23 THE WITNESS: Yes.
24 JUDGE SLOVITER: And the only question is, I gather,
25 the --
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1 MR. BARON: The lag time.
2 JUDGE SLOVITER: -- comprehensiveness of it?
3 MR. BARON: That's correct, your Honor.
4 JUDGE DALZELL: Well, and the desire.
5 JUDGE BUCKWALTER: And the what?
6 JUDGE DALZELL: And the desire. I mean, many of the
7 plaintiffs in this case who some reasonable people might
8 think are purveying, we'll use the motion picture parlance,
9 NC-17 say we're not doing that at all, we're giving safe sex
10 information, okay? Now, in the questions you're asking
11 should they advise Mrs. Duvall we're NC-17 even though they
12 don't think they should?
13 MR. BARON: I am establishing through this --
14 JUDGE DALZELL: Is that what you're getting at?
15 MR. BARON: Your Honor, that's a different legal
16 issue and it is, I would submit, a legal issue. I am asking
17 questions to the witness about a technical issue on the safe
18 harbor provisions.
19 THE COURT: Okay, fine.
20 BY MR. BARON:
21 Q Let's turn to another area of cyberspace and I regret
22 that there's a whole new terminology associated with it --
23 JUDGE SLOVITER: Okay, you'll go slow.
24 (Laughter.)
25 BY MR. COGAN:
78
1 Q UseNet, what is it?
2 A I won't go into the history that I did when we talked
3 last Friday, suffice it to say, it's a outgrowth of a
4 distributed bulletin board system that started with computers
5 calling each other up over the telephone and has migrated to
6 providing the communication over the Internet. There's a few
7 hundred thousand UseNet servers, they're just computers
8 around the world running UseNet server software. They
9 receive news group articles, which are just messages like E-
10 mail messages, there's a characterization of a news group at
11 the top of the article. News group articles are
12 hierarchically organized, so it's -- one that I happen to
13 read is rec.autos.sport.F1, because I happen to be a Formula
14 One car racing fan, and so this is articles about car racing,
15 about Formula One car racing, and it's put into a separate
16 directory on the server. And then as I as a client can -- I
17 as an observer can fire up a news client, which would then go
18 off and I could tell it I want it to look at this subset, and
19 it would show me the articles in the Formula One subsection.
20 Q Okay, thank you. And what is known as NNTP?
21 A Network News Transfer Protocol is the language which is
22 used for the UseNet servers to talk to each other over the
23 network itself, it's a handshaking mechanism by which a
24 server tells another server I've got Article Number 1234 from
25 Site 7, do you want it, and the other server can say yes or
79
1 no.
2 Q And what are ISP's?
3 A Jumping around in technology a little bit here. ISP is
4 the term that was actually coined by the National Science
5 Foundation, it refers to Internet Service Provider, it's a
6 company or an organization which is providing connectivity,
7 Internet connectivity. It may or may not also include
8 services such as news services or time services or E-mail
9 forwarding or things that, but the fundamental service that
10 it's offering is connectivity, the ability for Internet
11 protocol packets to get from your local network to out into
12 the Internet to -- theoreticall