* subscribe at http://techPolice.com Jailed Hacker Could Become First Victim of Bad Law Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. Newsday (New York, NY) Clive Thompson BY NOW, Dmitry Sklyarov is probably wishing he'd never set foot in this country. Sklyarov is the latest cause celebre on the Net. He works for a company in Russia called Elcomsoft, and two weeks ago he went to the Defcon-9 hacker conference in Las Vegas to do a presentation on a program he'd written called the Advanced eBook Processor (www.elcomsoft.com/aebpr.html). Then the FBI tossed him in jail. Whatever for? Well, it all centers around that little program he wrote - and the increasingly nasty politics of digital copyright. His program decrypts any e-books made using Adobe's new e-book technology (www.adobe.com). Ordinarily, when you buy an Adobe e-book, it's encrypted so that you can read it only on the computer where you originally download it. You can't transfer it to a new computer. Adobe thinks this is essential to prevent people from pirating the book. But the Elcomsoft guys argued it wasn't fair. If you've bought the e-book, they figured, you ought to be able to treat it precisely the way you treat an ordinary book - move it around, lend it to a friend, resell it, whatever. With normal books, you're legally allowed to do all of those things. So why not with e-books? Hence their software: Once you've decrypted the book, you can move it around as you would any other electronic document. As you might expect, Adobe flipped out over this. And the company had a powerful tool as a weapon: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was passed in 1998 to offer enhanced protection to creators of intellectual works (thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ cpquery/z?cp105:hr796:). Those works can include software. In fact, the federal law makes it illegal to write - and sometimes even to discuss - software that circumvents security protocols. It carries a fine of up to $500,000 and five years in jail. So when Adobe found out that Sklyarov was coming to town, company heads called the FBI and fingered him. They even helpfully pointed out his location. All of which illustrates just how how weirdly dangerous that legislation is turning out to be. The Digital Copyright Act offers an absolutely stunning amount of power to corporations. Sure, they ought to be able to protect their copyrights. But they shouldn't be able to call in the FBI as attack dogs. And they certainly shouldn't be able to curtail research and discussion into encryption, which is partly where all this is heading. Earlier this year, the music industry used the law to prevent a Princeton academic from even talking about ways to break music-encryption technology. This is so very bad that even Adobe has realized that it overreacted. In the face of several vociferous online boycott campaigns, such as the one being waged at www.boycottadobe.com, Adobe last week backpedalled and began calling for Sklyarov's release. Too late, though. As of my writing this, the FBI still hasn't released Sklyarov. Once you get federal agents involved, pride and inertia are involved. Sklyarov may well go down in history as the first guy to get sentenced under the law. I doubt, in his prison cell, that he savors the honor. ============================================================ Tips and tricks, introductions to breaking technologies, Updates on proven software tools, new ideas for old problems. Find it all in the developerWorks newsletter. http://click.topica.com/caaacCMb1dhr0b2EDp2f/developerWorks ============================================================ --via http://techPolice.com archive: http://theMezz.com/cybercrime/archive subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --via http://theMezz.com ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?b1dhr0.b2EDp2 Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: archive@jab.org T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
