Slashdot Mirror
Still in DMCA Prison
Let's go over the Sklyarov situation. Sklyarov is still in jail. In fact, he's still in Las Vegas, where he is being held without even a bail hearing, much less bail. The excuse given for not having a bail hearing when he was arrested on July 16 was that he was being immediately transferred to San Jose and would get a hearing there. Anyway, a recap of the protests: San Jose, more San Jose, New York, Seattle, Chicago writeup and Chicago pictures, Moscow writeup and Moscow photo and news coverage: New York Times, Business2.com. Wired has Washington's viewpoint - Representative Coble says "there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders". Well, duh. Linuxplanet has an opinion piece exploring the Digital Millennium Rape Act. Finally EFF has written a letter to U.S. Attorney Mueller, asking for the U.S. to drop the charges against Sklyarov. It seems pretty doubtful that he will, since he won't want to be seen as soft on crime during his Senate confirmation hearings.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
If you want to know how far the government is willing to go to "protect" us from these cyber-criminals, check out the Kevin Mitnick case. He was held in pre-trial detention for four years without a bail hearing.
I know it's l4m3 to talk about Kevin Mitnick and I'll get modded down for it, but even if you're with the "He stole millions of dollars by copying source code" camp you still have to agree that being held without a bail hearing for four years is a bit fishy.
Now it's starting to happen to a legitimate software developer. Who's next...
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I have read the same figures elsewhere. It was in a BBC site sometime last month, I think.
But what is not clear to me is the relation between the gun-banning law and this number. You see, if you ban guns doesn't possessing a gun become a "gun related-crime"?
If so, and if gun-possession crimes are included in the mighty 40% increase (making all this wonderfully circular), we are just seeing a FUD campaign, cortesy of our ever present friends, the gun-nuts.
Why do you believe that Adobe wants the charges dropped? Just because they say so? What effective actions toward that end have they taken?
I'm sorry. I feel that the crocodile tears were just that, and no more to be believed. Have they offered to pay for the defense? Have they offered to meet whatever bond is demanded? They set him up, so unless they take effective action to redress their wrong, I won't believe their public speech is anything other than a PR ploy.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Habeas Corpus is Latin for "Produce the body". In legal terms, it means that the government can't imprison someone for more that a couple days without charging him with a crime. I do believe that Sklyarov has already had an arraignment hearing where he was formally charged, then denied bail, so he already had his Habeas Corpus rights fulfilled.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Declan's article reads a little like propaganda, but I have no issues with being manipulated by it's message: our elected representatives have issued a challenge to the American people. They want to hear that we're upset about losing our rights to free speech and fair use. Like petulant Gods, they are toying with our lives to see if we will offer sacrifices, request forgiveness, or openly defy them in our evolution as a democracy. Only defiance will get the DMCA to go away. Any other course of action will doom us to greater injustice as they extend the boundaries of their unconstitutional behavior.
Americans do not think about copyright, Americans would rather not think about people in prison. Americans have a tendency to think circularly: people arrested must be criminals. All laws passed by congress are legitimate. We have an uphill battle convincing them that Dmitry has done nothing wrong, and that the DMCA is unconstitutional.
Don't accept "the Supreme Court will handle it." Who says they will? Why wait for the justice system? Once a sufficient number of Americans are informed about the existence of the DMCA and the erosion of their rights, we can make congress uphold their oaths and protect the constitiution like they should have done in the beginning.
The system is being challenged in court. Fine. But that is not justification for twiddling our thumbs in the mean time. Action now makes it easier for the judges to strike down the DMCA. Action now makes it easier for shy, right-thinking congress people to speak out about what a travesty the DMCA is.
Tell 3 people today about the DMCA. Join a protest next week, and tell 1,000. Make people think, encourage people to reason.
Free Dmitry.
Repeal the DMCA.
Why wait?
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Woah! I dunno where you got that idea, but the US Consitution applies to every human being within the US borders. Even illegal aliens are protected by the constitution.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Boston write-up and pictures, Wired article on the protests, On-line petition, IDG story, CNN copy of the original Reuters story (better late than never!), ironic page on the AAP website (the AAP issued a press release defending Adobe and the DMCA).
[
Boston Globe:
Adobe shifts, urges hacker's release
CBS News:
Hacker Held Under New Law
ABC News:
Russian programmer arrested at hacker convention for alleged violation of copyright law
MSNBC:
Adobe seeks release of Russian programmer arrested at Def Con
New York Times:
U.S. Arrests Russian Cryptographer as Copyright Violator
Arrest Raises Stakes in Battle Over Copyright
Protesters Target FBI Nominee Over Russian Arrest
Adobe Opposes Prosecution in Hacking Case
Those all seem pretty mainstream to me.
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Free Mac Mini
Hey, the russians are already doing capitalism better than we are, who put the first paying customer in space? Maybe now they can do freedom better too ;-)
-Thomas Jefferson
And ill probably be arrested for quoting him.
First, from the U.S. Constitution, Article I Section 9:
"The Privilege of the writ of habeas ccorpus shall not be suspended, unless, when in cases of reballion or invasion, the public safety may require it."[Emphasis added]
Notice that it says nothing about applying only to citizens.
A writ of habeas corpus is a court order demanding that the person of the imprisoned be brought before the court, and that the authority who holds him justify itself, usually by filing charges. Habeas corpus is latin for "give us the body!" The privilege of the writ has only been suspended once in US history, by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war. It doesn't say in the constitution who may suspend it, but legal scholars up until that point had always assumed that it was up to congress, for two reasons:
1) Under British common law, from which much of US law is taken, only parliament may suspend the privilege of the writ
2) The above quote is in Article I, which details the congress.
Hope this helps ease the confusion.
\
The problem with this is that it is not Dmitry's battle to fight. He is Russian. It is the responsibility of Americans to fight for the freedom of Americans, not Russians or anyone else.
I don't think so. Not in my case.
I do think that I would go to a high degree of pain for the cause, but in this case there may be better avenues. Eating this much crap to just hopefully get a little press is a little much. I personally would bow out and focus my time and energy on a more controlled campaign.
That being said, just to add my little opinion to the thread, I think what the authorities are doing here is just plain horrible. They're ignoring the constitution on one hand, while referencing and hiding behind it on the other.
More race stuff in one place,
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Microsoft was the true source of the Red Worm virus in an attempt to remind the Whitehouse who REALLY is the world super power.
Luckily their planned attack went through the same beta testing and forethought as the rest of their software.
But why are we playing by their rules? If we really want to be heard, we should use our abilities to make ourselves heard. America needs the developers, techies, and computer savvy people who oppose the DMCA to function as a country, to remain economically viable, and to remain internationally competetive.
Personally, I think we should show the nation just how much power they've inadvertantly given us. We should strike, or perform some equivalant that cripples the software and internet infrastructure that runs this economy. We should make a statement that shows that unless America listens to the very people who have created this Digital World, we're not going to give it to them anymore.
Sure, we'll get initially labeled as "evil hackers" and social miscreants, but we're educated enough to know that that's the price of freedom. And we're also the only people who can bail the country out of a technical catastrophe. The fact is that America needs us much more than America needs bogus laws that protect the wealthiest of companies. And we're everywhere, in every industry, and influencing every aspect of life.
Like the Patriots who threw tea overboard in Boston Harbor to protest unjust laws, we shall show that without the foundation technology upon which the Nation depends, no law prohibiting it's advancement and the open table research thereof shall survive or be tolerated.
Yep and none of that fancy email stuff either....
Type or handwrite(if you still remember how) to your "friends" on the Hill and express your outrage. Tell them what you think as a voter and as one of the most in demand workers on the planet (its true) on how these laws are not helpful to the US.
A couple of words of caution for those of you in the thros of rage.
Do not swear
Do not threaten to kill them if they do not comply
Do not include c4 or other explosives "to get your point across"
The EFF has moved to targeting the US Attorney on the case. Further action against Adobe, while perhaps deserved, would be fruitless.
We need to move on to the next step in getting Dmitry released, and in continuing to fight the DMCA. If we do this right, we might be able to get the entire law overturned.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
When Howard Coble says:
"The law is performing the way we hoped... As far as I know there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders."
what he means is
"My customers are very happy with their purchase."
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
But in the world of Washington politics, geektivists are woefully outnumbered by the natives who populate and influence confirmation hearings: Corporate, nonprofit and trade association lobbyists.
'Geektivist's' simply don't have the cash to compete with corporate lobbyist. There is no money in being morally right. Money buys laws.
air and light and time and space
Yes, I'm making the bizarre counterintuitive suggestion that movements in the British crime statistics since 1997 are not relevant to the question of whether it should be illegal to reverse engineer Adobe's ebook document format.
I may be wrong, but you're going to have to spell this out for me.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
- Analogises the crime of copyright infringement with the crime of rape.
- Analogises the prosecution of people for copyright infringement with the wholesale massacre of Jews.
- Wastes half of its length on a boring anti-gun-control rant utterly unrelated to the topic, and
- Destroys the entire case for freedom of information by claiming that hackers should be seen as analogous to mobs killing each other in Chicago (I am not making this up -- the fool's argument is that if hackers want to break the law they will do no matter what the law, therefore they should be allowed the tools to do so)
Quotes like "It's impossible to favor gun regulations and oppose computer regulations and remain philosophically consistent. " are calculated to get half the reasonable people in this country thinking that the DMCA must be a good thing after all, and the linked article's author is a prick of the worst kind for trying to hijack a genuine issue of liberty for his own half-assed political program. Even Eric Raymond has always had the common sense not to stoop this low.I always wondered whether there was a site out there with worse journalistic standards than Slashdot. Michael's found it, and he's linked to it. Congratulations.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Perhaps someone should file a Habeus Corpus petiton?
You've provided a lot of links - tell me, are the dead tree news outlets saying the same? What about Television - where has the DMCA and the Sklyarov arrest been mentioned? CNN? NBC Nightly News? Or has it been mentioned anywhere other than the internet? Techies and Geeks and people like me get their news online, most of the rest of the world uses newspapers, news magazines, television and radio.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
maybe it's a good thing (long term) that he's not being released. at least then some people might see just what a ridiculous thing this act is... and some courts might have a chance to blow the DMCA out of the water.
For those of you who are webmastering (and who isn't, at least on the side), think about placing EFF's blue ribbon on the front page of your site. Besides being really cool, it helps get out the message that the DMCA is curtailing OUR freedom of speech and keeping an innocent man in jail.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I use Adobe's PDF format and its Acrobat software to publish texts. If I can't get independent review of the software from noted scholars, then I'm going to be trusting my "very valuable" intellectual property to potentially bad software. That sounds bad for writers and artists everywhere. I also hate the copy protection mechanisms because they gum up the works in my office.
The FBI's job is to enforce the law. Not to enforce only good law that makes sense.
I say, enforce the bad law, expose it for what it is, and get it ruled as unconstitutional. Or, get congress to change the law, in light of the bad ways it is required to be enforced.
It's just sad that some poor sod has to sit in jail while this process goes on.
Just keep in mind, the folks who made the law are to blame, not the folks mandated to enforce it.
Above comment is personal opinion. Poster is not a spokesperson.
Back to Sklyarov: The DMCA obviously violates the first ammendment, but there may be arguments that it violates the second, fourth ("the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers") and eighth ("excessive fines") too.
Regardless of the DMCA, Sklyarov's imprisonment definitely violates the sixth ("an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed", ie. Russia) and the eleventh ("the Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to...Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.")
no he hasn't
You can't be charged with a Federal Felony without a grand jury determination that :
a) a crime has been committed
b) you are the person that likely committed that crime.
This little thing called the US Constitution requres this.
If you want to know more of the rules do a findlaw search on federal criminal procedure.
If we try and take away Sklyarov's freedom to make a point, how are we better than Adobe and the Feds? Isn't that what they did?
Don't make an unwilling martyr out of Sklyarov. Let him go home!
The U.S. needs to take care of their own problems.
'crow
CNN recently posted an interview with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft who states "[t]he idea you can get away with it ["cybercrime" (this is an undefined term)] here is an idea we must curtail ... There are no free passes in cyberspace." Ashcroft comments he plans to create "Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) units staffed by 77 personnel, including 48 lawyers" modeled after the existing unit in California, currently prosecuting Dmitry Sklyarov, created by FBI Director nominee Robert Mueller "whose nomination is expected to receive little opposition in Congress."
The CHIPs plan to hold illegal sites and post "a warning that the site has been seized by law enforcement" and present a "clear message that cybercrime carries real penalties for offenders."
The article further states that current EFF Executive Director, Shari Steele, addressed a letter to Ashcroft requesting the release of Sklyarov. Ashcroft had no comment regarding his ageny's charges against Sklyarov.
It looks DMCA will soon accrue an army or firm of brand new federal government attorneys under the Bush administration.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Ok, and you would not mind to be Dmitry and sit in prison during the duration of such a judgment? I doubt it. This man is not even a U.S. citizen, this is our problem --- this is America's problem that must be settled within our borders and subjecting a non-American to the worse attributes (prison) of such a test is a disgust. Yes, DMCA should be tested. But, not with this case. Dmitry needs to return to Russia to his family.
Let DMCA be tested by Americans. This nation we live in is responsible for this damn law; we should be the ones who deal with it; who correct the wrong.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I find it ironic that the current chairman and former CEO of Adobe was quoted as saying that one of the worst parts of being kidnapped is the forced separation from ones family. Isn't that what he has ( in part ) done to Sklyarov ?