Posted by jeme (Thursday July 19 2001 @ 11:14PM PDT)
A Russian computer programmer was arrested by the FBI on Monday after giving a
presentation at an annual computer security conference in Las Vegas. Dmitry
Sklyarov is being taken to the district of northern California for arraignment.
Mr. Sklyarov's lecture at the DefCon-9 conference was entitled "E-Book
Security: Theory and Practice". He was arrested at the behest of Adobe
Systems, a San Jose-based software company responsible for PhotoShop,
Illustrator and Premiere (all popular graphics packages for Microsoft Windows
and MacOS).
Dmitry wrote a program for his employer Elcomsoft of Moscow that
takes a document in Adobe's eBook format and outputs a regular PDF document.
The eBook format is designed to extremely limit a person's ability to make use
of the words and pictures in a book. A person can read and view the document,
but there is no printing, no cutting and pasting, no ability to highlight,
underline, or otherwise mark the book, no facility for taking notes in the
margins or excerpting passages into other documents.
These are all features
that we take for granted when we buy a book. Also, the eBook is "tied" to a
particular computer system and can only be decoded for reading on that system.
If you copy the document to your laptop, the reader software will reject it. If
you are done with it and want to pass it on to a friend, it will not work and
your friend would have to pay for the use of it on his computer as well. We
think nothing of giving away (or selling to recoup our costs) a book when we
are finished reading it, but this format makes that impossible.
In Russia,
every person is gauranteed the right to make copies for backup or personal use
of any work regardless of that work's copyright status or any license imposed
in the acquisition of a copy of the work. Therefore, AEBPR is a valuable and
legal utility to have and use in Russia.
While Dmitry Sklyarov is said to hold
the copyright for the program, his employer Elcomsoft is responsible for
distribution of the work. According to the provisions of 1998's Digital
Millenium Copyright Act (US Code Title 17 Section 1201), trafficking in a
device to circumvent a "technological protection measure" that "effectively
controls access" to a work is a crime punishable by up to five (5) years in
prison and 0,000 fine.
In at least one case, the "technological protection
measure" that "effectively controls access" was a simple Caesar cypher. That
is to say, the letters of the document were simply shifted a fixed number of
characters across the alphabet. This is the sort of encryption a grade-schooler
might use to make his classroom notes unreadable by his enemies. The invention
of this system is (however aprocyphally) attributed to Julius Caesar, making it
the oldest encryption scheme known to man.
While Dmitry is the copyright holder
and primary author of the work, this work was done in a country in which such
work is legal and encouraged. The distribution of the work in this country was
done by Elcomsoft, a Russian company.
Dmitry Sklyarov is a graduate student in
his native Russia where he has a wife and two children. Since his arrest, he
has had no contact with Russian Consul or his family, associates and friends.
The above is all fact.
Now for some interpretation and opinion: First, the DMCA
(Digital Millenium Copyright Act) seems to protect, and is certainly being used
to protect, the ability of a corporation to add new controls to their already
granted copyright monopolies by simply adding technological measures that
"effectively" protect the few rights a copyright holder can legitimately
claim and inhibit any other actions the copyright holder finds unsavory. In
essence, I can take a work like this one: I AM A CRIMINAL, PLEASE INCARCERATE
ME UNDER THE DMCA. Submit it to my "encryption scheme" and get: V NZ N
PEVZVANY, CYRNFR VAPNEPRENGR ZR HAQRE GUR QZPN. Now, distribution of a
"device" that decodes this message could be construed as illegal under the
DMCA.
Forget the fact that every unix system and every USENET newsreader in the
world has the capability to do what is called ROT13 translation (shifting every
character 13 characters to the right, so that A becomes N, B becomes O, etc.),
which is the scheme I used to "encrypt" my message above.
Second, is Dmitry
Sklyarov responsible for the actions of his employer (distributing a
circumvention device)? Even if he wrote the program single-handedly, he wasn't
the entity doing the distributing. Not to mention the fact that all of it was
written by a foreign national in a foreign nation. What jurisdiction does the
US have to imprison such a man? Beyond that, his work on the eBook was part of
his doctoral thesis (and hence, his authority to speak on the subject at DefCon
9) and is clearly the work of a scientist for academic purposes.
If we have
come to a point where the FBI is prosecuting employees of a corporation for the
crimes committed by the corporation, I'd like to submit my list. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation has offered legal counsel, but has been denied
access to Dmitry so far (as has everyone else).
There is a protest outside
Adobe Systems' headquarters in San Jose, California on Monday, 23 July, 2001
at eleven o'clock in the morning. They will meet across the street from the
Adobe building (I believe the tallest building in San Jose) in Plaza de Cesar
Chavez near the statue of Quetzecoatl.
There are several solidarity protests at
both Adobe offices and federal buildings throughout the country. I am working
with the EFF and anyone else that can help to organize a solidarity action in
Portland to be held in front of the federal building at the designated time. We
will talk about the case, pass out flyers, and hopefully just make a strong
showing to stop this international atrocity. Other cities hosting solidarity
actions are Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, an d Moscow.
Visit the
demonstration coordination site There is also talk of an IT walk-out (more of a
sick-out) in solidarity to show that information workers will not be treated
this way. The day of the walk-out has not yet been determined.
This is truly a monstrosity, to be added to many other monstrosities in the DMCA. How many people are aware that this flagrantly anticonstitutional piece of legislation makes the term of a copyright potentially extendible up to 95 years?!! (The Constitutions says, "Congress shall have power to grant to inventors exclusive rights to their inventions FOR A LIMITED TIME"(!)) By making the maximum copyright term far longer than the lifespan of most human beings, the US Congress has effectively given copyright holders rights in perpetuity.
The 1996 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Sonny Bono's
legacy to mankind, will go down in infamy as one of a raft of draconian laws passed in the 1990s that decisively shifted the balance of power and wealth into the hands of the owners of capital as never before.