NYT op-ed: Jail Time in the Digital Age
- From: J Flenner <varney@[redacted]>
- Subject: NYT op-ed: Jail Time in the Digital Age
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 14:34:31 -0400
[Moderator: Readers of this list may recognize the writer of this
article; among other things, he's the lawyer who represented
listmember Eric Eldred in his suit to overturn US copyright
extension. (That suit, by the way, was denied rehearing en banc
earlier this month, so unless the plaintiffs get a hearing at the
Supreme Court, it would appear to be over.) - JMO]
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/opinion/30LESS.html
July 30, 2001, NYTimes, Op-Ed
Jail Time in the Digital Age
By LAWRENCE LESSIG
STANFORD, Calif. Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who,
until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program
that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his
employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation
bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by
the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas
describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software.
Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in
a Las Vegas jail.
Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America.
Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer
did not violate anyone's copyright. What his program did was to
enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions
that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for
Adobe's reader might have imposed.
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