Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation met July 27 with federal attorneys for the Northern District of California in an attempt to release a Russian software engineer arrested and jailed on copyright felony charges. At the urging of EFF board members, Adobe Systems had withdrawn its complaint July 24 against Dmitry Sklyarov, who is one of the authors of a program that cracks the encryption of Adobe’s eBook format.
However, since this is a criminal matter and the first prosecution under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is up to the U.S. attorney’s office to drop the charges, whether or not Adobe has backed off, Wired News reported July 24.
Meanwhile, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) again said he would introduce an amendment to the DMCA later this year. “It’s a broad overreach to have a person arrested under the federal criminal laws simply because they made software that circumvents a technological measure,” he said. Boucher hopes to fashion a bill that “would restore the classic balance [of fair use rights].”
Such legislation would undoubtedly be opposed vigorously by the same industries that got the DMCA passed in the first place. The Association of American Publishers hailed Sklyarov’s arrest as consistent with DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions. “Distribution of the means to strip eBooks of their access and copyright protections is not a public service,” AAP President Pat Schroeder said, “any more than it would be a public service to distribute the keys that unlock a bookstore or a public library.”
Posted July 30, 2001.