More on Arrest of Russian Programmer

An excerpt from Publisher's Lunch

Michael Cader, Publishers Lunch

Copyright 2000 Publisher's Lunch.
This article first appeared in Publisher's Lunch. Reprinted with permission.

Wednesday, July 18, 2001

Reuters and the NY Times confirm that Russian ElcomSoft employee Dmitry Skylarov, 26 or 27, was arrested at his hotel room in Las Vegas by the FBI and is being held without bail awaiting transfer to San Francisco on one count of trafficking in software to circumvent copyrighted materials and one count of aiding and abetting such trafficking. This is one of the first criminal cases ever brought under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and a fine of as much as $500,000. The arrest will only add fuel to the fire of protest against the DMCA, which advocacy groups are trying to have declared unconstitutional.

It would seem that if ElcomSoft had given the program away for free--as they do now in a "demonstration" version--they would not face liability here. The NYTimes account implies the Russian company was subject to US jurisdiction only because its sales were processed through a U.S.company, Register Now. Which would seem like a pretty easy loophole for anyone else to avoid in future.

Ironically, Elcomsoft says that Adobe's Acrobat software itself would be considered illegal in Russia, Germany, and certain Scandinavian countries, which require software manufacturers to give users a way of making a backup copy. The company underscores that its software can only be used by people who have legimately purchased an Adobe eBook--thus allowing backups among other things, though of course once unencrypted the PDF file can be given to anyone.

Adobe is still depicting this is a case of determined hackers, saying that no protection scheme is foolproof but that they "use industry standard technologies to make our products difficult to compromise," according to marketing vp Susan Altman Prescott. Whereas Elcomsoft is saying that the whole scheme is poorly constructed and breaking it--twice now--was a snap.

In either event, the whole affair underscores the failure thus far of digital rights management to do anything other than turn off consumers.

MORE INFO

Planet eBook & Planet PDF have built an index of as much content as we could find related to the release of ElcomSoft's AEBPR, Adobe's subsequent actions, and now the arrest of Sklyarov by US officials. Included is the Planet eBook & Planet PDF coverage, links to online discussions, as well as links to numerous articles published over the past few days.