Death of the First
We begin our assault on copyright idiocy here.
They came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist
— Martin Niemoller, “First they came…”
On July 16, 2001, Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested after giving a talk at DefCon on e-book security. Dmitry worked for a Russian company called ElcomSoft that distributed software capable of removing the copy protection on e-books. Among other things, this allows visually impaired computer users to purchase an e-book and use it with a text-to-speech reader. Under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, however, this software makes Dmitry a hardened criminal.
To recap—a foreign national enters the US to speak at a conference, and even though speech is a constitutionally protected activity (and speaking is all he is doing), he is arrested. He has participated in the development of a product that technically could be used to break a law—a product that was written and distributed in another country—a country where the product itself is perfectly legal.
Dmitry Sklyarov has effectively been arrested for speeding on the Interstate, because he was once seen doing 180 on the Autobahn.
If you are the owner of an e-book, it is within your fair use rights to make a copy, print it out, use quotations in scholarly work and so forth. Fifty years after the author’s death (in Canada, where I live and work), it is within your rights to strip all copy-protection entirely, as this work has fallen into the public domain. So long as you own the e-book, the fair use doctrine gives you the right to perform these actions—with or without using this particular software. So where is the crime?
In the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave, you can own a gun to protect yourself from neighbours and tyrannical governments, but you don’t dare string bits together. Those silly framers didn’t put software into the constitution.
Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian citizen, came to a conference in the United States of America to speak about e-book security, and was arrested.
First Amendment be damned. There’s copyright on the line.
kj · PDDV
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