DRM For the Forces of Good
By Bret A. Fausett
As I write this, Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer professional, is sitting in a United States federal jail awaiting arraignment on charges that he violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Mr. Sklyarov traveled to the United States from his home in Moscow to give a lecture at this year's Def Con 9 convention in Las Vegas, NV. His topic? "E-books Security—Theory and Practice." The presentation promised an overview of the "security aspects of electronic books and documents," including "a demonstration of how weak they are." In other words, Mr. Sklyarov was going to describe how to defeat the copyright protection scheme found in a number of proprietary e-book formats. The day after the lecture, he was arrested.
While the lecture at Def Con 9 was the occasion that brought Mr. Sklyarov within the jurisdiction of the United States and easy reach of U.S. law enforcement, it was work he had done for his company back in Moscow that allegedly violated U.S. law. His lecture may have been titled "E-Books Security—Theory and Practice," but it was the "practice" part that landed him in jail. His Moscow-based company, ElcomSoft, writes and distributes software products. One of these, the Advanced eBook Processor, takes files encoded for Adobe's proprietary eBook Reader and translates them into standard PDF files. From there, anyone can read the text and copy, cut, or paste it into any other text application. In Russia, his software is perfectly legal.
In the United States, however, the DMCA creates both civil and criminal penalties for "circumvent[ing] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work."
