Have We Started a Digital Cold War?

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.

Friday, July 20, 2001

University of Wisconsin professor Siva Vaidhyanathan points out via the MSNBC site the ironies of the recent enforcement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against a Russian programmer. "America has always assumed the moral high ground over the way China and Russia trample the rights of their citizens to free expression. So it's pretty embarrassing that U.S. officials have arrested a Russian software engineer and charged him with a violation of a law he might have broken while working in Moscow--if he broke a law at all."

In his eyes, we've started a "new Cold War. It's not political. It's corporate. It's not ideological. It's pragmatic. It's not martial. It's digital. What's at stake are not lives. They are electronic books."

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.