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Sklyarov Indicted
Nutcase was the first to write with news from the AP that "Dmitry Sklyarov, 27 and ElComSoft Co. Ltd. of Moscow were charged with five counts of copyright violations for writing a program that lets users of Adobe Systems' eBook Reader get around copyright protections imposed by electronic-book publishers." Here's a link to the AP story at the Washington Post. Here is the story at Salon as well. Update: 08/29 01:57 AM GMT by T : Here's the EFF's release on the indictment, too -- including information about where to go if you'd like to demonstrate your reaction publicly.
Consider too that many of the best minds are not from America, and this sort of bullshit will easily dissuade them from ever touching on American soil.
The DCMA and disgustingly similar concepts are going to box the United States in, and slowly but utterly stagnate it.
Summary:
Prosecution for Speaking (thought police) =
Fewer bright citizens immigrating (or just plain aiding) for fear of prosecution =
Fewer innovations in the USA =
The eventual demise of an empire.
Quite the leap, but you know... I ain't the only one saying it.
I questioned early on whether the ACLU would risk their hollywood gravy train by coming out in support of Sklyarov. Several Slashdot posters indicated they would use the feedback page to see why the ACLU was totally silent (try searching for "Sklyarov" -- absolutely nothing). Still nothing, though.
Those of you who are ACLU supporters should take careful note of this.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You are seeing the creation of the new drug war. You can expect to see the following features of DW-I in instant replay
- criminalization of perfectly ethical behavior that powerful segments of society happen not to approve of,
- draconian penalties for these supposed crimes,
- justification of this nonsense on the basis of huge ass-pulled numbers purporting to show how much damage the "crime" is doing to the economy,
- legislators and public prosecutors fanning the fire to further their careers,
- courts that will set aside your traditional freedoms because the wankers in the FBI can't get their convictions in a free society,
- ultimately, absolutely no impact on the behavior that Drug War II was supposed to control, and
- a new eco-niche for genuine crime, created by the new legal system and exploited by punks who will ultimately be the next generation's Organized Crime (cf. prohibition, Drug War I).
Fear for your freedoms.Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I guess I'll take this opportunity to link to this entry in my Smokedot diary. I encourage webmasters to read it, because I'd like some assistance.
The short version: if you're a webmaster, and have pages on your site related to digital copyright issues - especially Sklyarov's case - check your logs for hits from the 198.25.0.0 - 198.26.255.255 netblock, which is controlled by NIPR (DoD Network Operations - a quick whois of 198.25.0.0@whois.arin.net will confirm this) containing a user agent of "Inktomi Search". A pair of machines at Kelly AFB in Texas with that user-agent have been the source of regular hits to my page on Sklyarov, about once a day. The hits are regular and targeted enough to convince me it's not a case of kiddiez spoofing, and I've had at least one report of very similar behaviour toward another site; targeted hits from a couple DoD boxen using a web spider. I'm doing some light investigation of the activity, and would be very interested in any logs documenting this type of behaviour.
If nothing else, I'd love to know why DoD machines are being used to search for copyright-related pages.
Side-note: some of the information I've gathered on NIPR implies that the group has constructed a firewall around the DoD workstations and servers; hence, any hits from NIPR.mil addresses may be the firewall/border routers and not the actual boxes performing the searches. However, at some point, DoD boxes are involved, and I'd like to know just what they're up to.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Why isn't the reverse happening now? My girlfriends (who speaks Russian) tells me that the case is being covered in the Russian press, but its very much a 1/4 column on page 6 type of story. Perhaps Russia wants the big US corporations to invest in their country and doesn't want to upset them?
Anybody seen any comment from the Russian government?