FBI Arrests Russian Programmer
for Violating DMCA
A Russian software engineer was arrested July 16 by the FBI at his Las Vegas hotel the day after he lectured at a hacker conference about the Advanced eBook Processor—a program that cracks the encryption of Adobe’s eBook format. Dmitry Sklyarov, who is said to have developed the algorithms for the Moscow-based firm ElcomSoft, was charged with violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Within a day, ElcomSoft had mounted information about Sklyarov’s arrest and a history of the firm’s month-long legal battle with Adobe. Company President Alexander Katalov expressed anger over the incident, saying that in Russia, “we have no law like the DMCA.” In fact, he explained, distributing Adobe’s eBook software is illegal, “since Russian law requires . . . the purchaser to make at least one legal [backup] copy.”
“I never thought that the DMCA criminal provisions would be actively used,” Siva Valdhyanathan of the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies told the CNet online news service July 17, adding that antipiracy initiatives “are usually all about threat and bluster and money.”
“American corporations have never been shy about using taxpayer money to enforce their rights,” Jennifer Granick of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society told CNet. “This could be the beginning of something bad. Or it could be the beginning of something good—if people say, ‘What the heck is this law that we’ve passed?’”
“Piracy is not a new issue,” Adobe spokesperson Susan Altman Prescott replied in the July 18 CNet, “We understand the nature of copyright violation and how to prevent it.”
Posted July 23, 2001.
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