Copyright Law Enforcement Provokes Protests
By Sarah Lai Stirland

NEW YORK, Nov. 23 (UPI) — Hundreds of civil libertarians, programmers, engineers and online activists enraged over the latest dramatic enforcement of a strict digital-era copyright law demonstrated in cities across the United States Monday, as civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation sat behind closed doors negotiating the first steps of the release of a Russian programmer arrested for violating the law.

In cities all over the United States around noon, protestors walked around with "Free Dmitry" signs and handed out flyers explaining the complex free speech and fair use issues related to the DMCA. Protests took place in front of software maker Adobe Systems' offices and in other heavily trafficked public spaces in New York City, Reno, Nevada, Seattle, Wa., Austin, Tx, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose Ca., and Boston, Mass. The biggest and most vociferous rally appeared to be in front of Adobe's headquarters in San Jose, where hundreds of protesters chanted: "Set Dmitry free today, hey, hey, ho ho. The DMCA has got to go." In Washington DC, a small rally of 10 people gathered in front of FBI headquarters.

The protest was sparked off by the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer security systems expert in Las Vegas last Monday. The US attorney's office for the Northern District of California has charged him with trafficking in software that allows readers to copy electronic books. The FBI arrested Sklyarov after he gave a speech at Defcon-9, an Internet security conference in Las Vegas, about his company Elcomsoft's product, the Advanced eBook Processor. Elcomsoft's product unlocks software maker Adobe Systems' copyright protection system on its eBook Reader product. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act criminalizes the act of breaking through any technological security system that has been implemented to protect intellectual property. Violators face up to five years in jail or fines of up to $500,000.

This arrest is among the first cases of criminal enforcement of the DMCA, which is a broad law that seeks to give intellectual property owners more control in an age when information threatens to run out of control because of the ease with which digital information can be electronically copied and redistributed through the Internet without compensating the original copyright owners.

Sklyarov's arrest highlights the increasingly acrimonious battle over how copyrights should be defined as information, entertainment and communications become digital. As Sklyarov's case and previous DMCA cases show, the law now focuses on the mere act of accessing information rather than copying it. Many people following the issues see the DMCA as the first step toward a world in which publishing and entertainment companies act as a sort of Orwellian Big Brother that gets to dictate exactly how consumers can access any kind of published information and entertainment.

"Basically, the DMCA outlaws [mechanisms that function like] photocopiers - not when someone uses the photocopier to sell cheap copies of Steven King novels, but because it could be used to do so - copyright law traditionally has prosecuted the infringer, not the mechanism of infringement. The DMCA turns those tables," said C. Scott Ananian, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology involved in the protests. "Adobe has every right to go after pirates who attempt to profit from illicit copies of eBooks, but they should go after the pirates, not the photocopier."

What concerns Ananian is that this law only applies to digital information and he believes that in five to 10 years all information will be produced electronically.

"If your kid is doing his book report on an eBook, Dmitry's software allows him to extract text and pictures and use it - he can make a poster for class with his favorite pictures and quotes from each charater," said Ananian, echoing what many legal academics have already noted as problematic with the DMCA. "With the DMCA, a publisher can design a system that locks stuff up much tighter than copyright law would normally allow, but for which there would be a criminal prosecution of anyone who cracks the lock," says Jonathan Zittrain, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

At a time in which the digitization of information makes information more portable and convenient to access in different formats, the DMCA has the potential to slow down that development by giving publishers an unprecedented amount of control over how they want to publish information and what subsequently happens to the information once it's published. Civil libertarians and legal scholars studying the issues worry that the effect could inadvertently impede the flow of information in our society. As an example, Harvard's Zittrain said that libraries' abilities to lend books could be constrained by electronic book software if books were exclusively published using specific pieces of ebook software since some versions only allow readers to access the book on one specific computer. Under the DMCA, librarians could be jailed for trying to convert those books to more portable formats so that they could lend the books.

Adobe first informed the FBI about Moscow-based Elcomsoft and its online distribution of its Advanced eBook Processor in late June. Anti-piracy investigators at Adobe told the FBI that they were concerned that people could download the Advanced eBook Processor over the Internet and use it to unlock Adobe's eBook Reader software in order to copy eBooks without paying the booksellers, according to an FBI agent's affadavit. "The reason we alerted the US attorney's office is because of the infringement on copyright law - our interest is in protecting copyrighted material, that's the crux of it for us," said an Adobe spokesperson.

The protestors believe that corporations have extended the protections for intellectual property to the point where it's come at the expense of making new discoveries, since the DMCA has made it illegal to reverse engineer an encrypted product without the copyright owner's permission. This has impeded researchers' abilities to find flaws in existing encryption systems and fix them. This spring, for example, the Recording Industry of America threatened to sue Princeton professor Ed Felten if he published his findings on the digital watermarking system written by the Secure Digital Music Initiative Consortium.

Protestors reporting from the demonstrations said that most passers-by were curious about the issue, but hardly anyone knows what the DMCA is. When a programmer explained the issues to her, 16-year-old Maria Kosovsky, who was working as a page at the New York Public Library sounded skeptical. "It sounds to me that [the publishers] are just trying to make money. It's a capitalist system, people have a right to make money and free books isn't part of the system," she said.

Protestors around the country and even around the world met online through an electronic e-mail list last week to organize their demonstrations in 21 cities in the United States and in Moscow. Meanwhile a cottage industry of propaganda tools to explain and popularize the complex issues involved in this protracted fight has quickly mushroomed in Cyberspace. Chants, slogans, flyers, posters and t-shirts have been created and a several Web sites, including www.boycottadobe.com and www.freedmitry.com are up and running. After talking with representatives from the Electronic frontier Foundation Monday Adobe released a joint statement with the EFF calling for Sklyarov's release.

"We believe that if Adobe says that they would like to withdraw their complaint, the US attorney's office will consider that very carefully, and whether to proceed with prosecuting Sklyarov," said Will Doherty, an EFF spokesman.

Skylarov remained in jail in Las Vegas and is scheduled to be extradited to San Jose sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday, said Alexander Katalov, Elcomsoft's president in San Francisco. A statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California said that Sklyarov made an initial appearance in federal court in Las Vegas last Monday and was detained without bail. No date had been set for his next appearance but Katalov said he had retained legal counsel for Sklyarov.