Safecracking 101? Advanced Jailbreaking? Securities Fraud for the New Millennium? The First Amendment Guide to Fun and Profit? Publishing Government Secrets in a Deconstructionist Era?

Are those courses not yet available at your local college or university? Just wait awhile, because if the latest argument on "academic freedom" takes hold, they soon could be.

This is not a clean and simple story. Few are. But the complications of it make it no less disturbing.

As virtually everyone knows, the music and movie industries are working fervently to establish technological and legal protection for their intellectual property to curtail mass piracy through unauthorized digital technology and Internet distribution. One of their approaches has been an increasingly sophisticated series of copy codes designed to prevent reproduction of digital signals. So-called digital "watermarks" embedded in music files are an example of these recent developments.

Last September, a music industry group sought to test the security of a handful of watermarks by establishing a contest for cryptographic researchers. A cash prize was offered to those who could break the codes.

A team of researchers led by a Princeton University computer science professor did just that, then decided not to accept the cash but to publish their results instead. At that point, the project crashed. The music industry group stopped the presentation of the code-breaking paper at a scientific conference and has warned that publication will violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits disclosure of code-breaking information. At least one of the codes is already in commercial use and will be compromised by its disclosure.

For their part, some elements of the academic community have cited "academic freedom" and the possible unconstitutionality of DMCA on free speech grounds as a defense of the research group’s actions.

Now, as surely could have been predicted from the start, the code-breaking details are appearing on websites devoted to such matters, as are letters from the music industry group trying to stop the disclosures.

There are no codes that cannot be broken, and hackers academic and criminal will not be deterred from either the intellectual exercise or attempts to achieve notoriety or profit from their prowess. Those are givens, as if written on stone microchips. But all too often, the concepts of free speech, fair use and academic freedom are being bent and distorted to defend practices that are not nearly so principled as the origins of the concepts, which have legitimate and necessary purpose.

As ill-advised as the contest most certainly was, it was a contest with rules. Among those rules was the intent, clearly stated in several different ways, that details of the code-breaking were to be secret. Further, participants were informed in advance of DMCA restrictions against publication.

Those who would cite academic freedom as justification for violating private contracts and public laws do not demonstrate sufficient responsibility of character or thought to earn much respect. Is the Princeton-led research team the moral equivalent of Napster? No. But in this instance neither is their activity of such virtue as to deserve an academic freedom defense. Although there are those who would apply that principle to any act or utterance of anyone occupying any university position, that begs the question, not adjudicated to our knowledge, of what happens when a university professor yells "fire" in a crowded theater.

Some of our institutions of higher learning seem intent on degrading both their mission and their reputations on numerous fronts, and incidents such as this one are demonstrative.

Digital technology and the Internet are exponential new developments. Their potential is mind boggling. They will advance education, the economy and communication as well as empower free speech and free thought on a global basis. But as we struggle through this unexplored technological terrain, we must be guided by some exceptionally old values — the moral, ethical and legal principles that preserve the social contract.