The Adobe Box

By Roger Sperberg

Article originally appeared at eBookWeb.org on July 20, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

To start with, Adobe Systems needs a good PR advisor.

On the eBook Community discussion forum, a couple of hundred messages have been posted deploring Adobe's actions in the Sklyarov arrest. No one from the company has bothered to respond. Finally, it was left to Steve Potash, head of Overdrive and a board member of the Open eBook Forum, to offer a defense: "Adobe, as a worldwide leader in publishing, has an obligation to every publisher, author, reseller of content to aggressively protect the intellectual property being compromised. They acted responsibly to minimize the threat to their customer's property. They acted lawfully. ... I applaud [them]."

Yesterday an otherwise excellent story in the Los Angeles Times repeated the canard that last winter Adobe had tried to restrict people from reading the eBook Alice in Wonderland aloud or even printing the public-domain title. I wrote to the paper that "things have been set right. Not because Adobe had to be persuaded to change their position on this, but because they corrected a mistake when it was pointed out to them." The reason I felt compelled to respond is that, in the six months since this misapprehension arose, Adobe has never issued a statement about it.

When Adobe does explain its actions, it seems to have no idea what message is being conveyed. Yesterday NPR correspondent Rick Karr asked the question a lot of people had on their minds -- Why was Adobe persecuting an individual rather than pursuing the company? Dimitry Sklyarov is only one of the team of programmers who created the AEBPR program. Adobe general counsel Colleen Pouliot explained why they thought Sklyarov, a graduate student and father of two, should be fined and jailed instead of Adobe's filing suit against his employer: "Honestly, we didn't think the likelihood was terribly high of getting any money out of a Russian company."

Oh, right. The money is the important thing here, not people -- is that really the point Adobe wants to make?

Just so we're clear here on what this means: According to Vladimir Katalov, Elcomsoft managing director, it is thought that Sklyarov is being kept in solitary confinement after his arrest. After four days in jail he had had no contact with his wife or children (photo), and was only permitted to speak to the Russian consul yesterday.

If you missed the news, he was arrested when visiting the United States to give a talk about eBook security, the subject of his doctoral thesis and part of his contribution to AEBPR. That program permits Russian citizens to make accessible backups of Adobe eBooks, which contravene Russian law by obstructing data backup. Its use is legal in many parts of the world, including Russia, Scandanavia and Germany, but not the U.S. The program's sale was suspended at Adobe's instigation more than two weeks before Sklyarov's visit to America.

To most of the world, this looks like persecution, not justice.

Which is to say, Adobe seems to have put itself in a box here. And unlike the sleek box that the company's graphic software comes in, this box won't be so easy to open.

As Potash explained, Adobe has to keep the confidence of its customers -- publishers who deliver their books in Adobe format -- and so they need to fight the losing battle of trying to limit how digital products are distributed. As cryptographic expert Bruce Schneier says, this is futile. "Trying to secure this is like trying to make water not wet." Adobe chimes in: "No software on the market is 100 percent secure."

So Adobe's got to do something. After all, if you go to Google and type in "Adobe password recovery" you'll already find hundreds upon hundreds of entries listing companies or programs that will crack open a protected PDF. And the protection given to the Adobe eBook format is weaker than that for PDF, according to Elcomsoft and others.

So on that list of Adobe's needs, after that PR person add "a better security system."

Of course, these two are inter-related. Adobe seems to have decided that the best way to maintain confidence in their security is to attack the "tall, lanky graduate student with a lopsided smile" (as The New York Times described him) as one of the renegade hackers we must all despise -- Russian nihilists only out to destroy what is good and respectable in the world.

This seems to have backfired.

When I look at it -- and this is my personal take on the situation -- I think that Adobe is reaping the whirlwind sewn by the movie studios' heavy-handed approach to Linux users' decoding of DVDs, and the music industry's threatening to sue Princeton professor Edward Felten if he gave a talk about the weaknesses of their encryption algorithm. Despite masquerading as cases protecting artists rights, in both incidents the obvious beneficiaries were the money-heavy entertainment industries who had manipulated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) till it best suited their needs.

By grabbing for the handiest tool to squash the threat to its product, Adobe has touched off a firestorm. (I can't avoid the image. After all, some people have suggested staging an eBook burning at Adobe headquarters as a protest.) A boycott of all Adobe products is being organized -- not just of the money-losing eBooks but of the very profitable software. A demonstration has been planned for Monday in San Jose, and several other cities. Condemnations are flying.

One poster to the free-sklyarov mail list referred to "Adobe hypocrites."

I agreed with the response: "With respect, we are not their enemies; we're their customers."

But DMCA cuts too close to the bone for a lot of people. It seems a mistake to go after the programmer -- and the professor and the Linux altruists -- instead of the professional pirates, the people who would actually be harming Adobe's sales.

And it's because of their detestation of DMCA that people have resisted Adobe's claim of being an innocent victim in all of this.

So intrepid reliance on DMCA seems to be punishing Adobe out of proportion to their intent. Then there's the company's apparent ignorance of differing mores -- and laws -- in the rest of the world. Better add a non U.S.-centric world view to that list. And something regarding the interests of their other customers -- the readers who buy those eBooks.

With an eBook, I want to do the same things I do with a printed book -- read it, carry it around, make notes in it and give it to a friend. But if I upgrade to a new computer and then I can't open the eBooks I own anymore, I don't believe that's a limitation of technology. It's a limit put there by, well, Adobe and Microsoft, to name the progenitors of the two most-used e-reading formats.

I resist their spin on this, and that makes it easier for me to resist Adobe's spin on this copy-prevention issue.

Brian Harrington, digital curator at Johns Hopkins' Milton S. Eisenhower library, goes into the issue of in an email to the eBook Community: "I have yet to see a license that says in nice bold print: 'Warning, you are only allowed to use this product on a single machine. Not one at a time, but just one ever! If you buy a snazzier machine, you must license another copy of this product. Of course if you don't agree to this we will immediately issue a credit to your Visa/Mastercard for the full purchase price.' "

We're not even talking fair-use versus no-lending licensing here, but denial of access. Of course there's resentment because of this. And of course people resist the claim that a program like AEBPR is just for criminals -- it restores what readers regard as their natural rights to a book.

In the '80s, copy protection was the bane of computing, and schemes that defeated copy protection were seen as good things, not evil. I don't know anybody today who thinks computing would have grown so fast if PCs hadn't rid themselves of the copy protection problem (the "problem" being copy protection, not the tools to defeat copy protection). This was when there were only a few hundred thousand and then a few million PCs, not hundreds of millions.

That legacy extends to today. Nobody is in favor of letting pirates sell your software, but there's definitely a tolerance of people who advance things (e.g., even crackers who break a security measure) and a disdain for people who want to use legislation to keep software tools from being distributed.

So Adobe seems to have misread what their customer-readers want, what the general population in the U.S. and around the world thinks about DMCA, what it will take to secure eBooks, and how little people admire actions that put money above individuals and liberty.

They've boxed themselves in and it will take some doing to get out.

MORE INFO

  • Software Double Bind, Amy Harmon, New York Times, August 13, 2001
  • See Roger Sperberg's related articles at eBookWeb.org
  • See article index -- Planet eBook & Planet PDF has a regularly updated index of all articles related to this issue, as well as links to the coverage by other news outlets.

About Roger Sperberg
Roger Sperberg is an eBook columnist for Fictionforest.com and eBookWeb.org. He is the author of Real Soon, Raccoon, a children's illustrated eBook available in Adobe Acrobat eBook and Microsoft Reader formats.