ElcomSoft Back For More

graveyhead writes "Most everyone here should remember the Dmitri Skylarov fiasco last year. Apparently ElcomSoft, the company Dmitry works for, is not intimidated by Adobe or the DMCA. Wired is running this story that describes ElcomSoft's upcoming products, most of which could be interpreted as a violation of the DMCA. What's particularly interesting is that this announcement comes right at the beginning of the trial which is scheduled to begin on August 26."

Comments

They won't ever care

[ehiris]

Their business is in Russia. Russia doesn't have anything to do with the DMCA neither will they ever.

Maybe that's the reason there are so many financially poor scientists in Russia.

Re:They won't ever care

[sofist]

What do you mean by this? Are you trying to say that Russia is poor becouse it dosen't have the DMCA - you probably don't know this but some of the Russian scientist are living very well and earning a lot... Just not all, but thats all so the case with all other scientists in the World.

Re:They won't ever care

[mcc]

Maybe that's the reason there are so many financially poor scientists in Russia.

Hmm.. and here i thought it was because russia is an economically devastated country that hasn't completely recovered from 40 years of autocracy in which an absolutely powerful government accountable to no one (and rife with corruption at all levels) purposefully tried to engineer an agrarian culture, while mismanaging funds and the economy and covering up the damage it had done by arresting anyone who dared to speak out about anything that was wrong with the country. I had also thought that the reason the economy hadn't yet gotten back on its feet was a combination of a total lack of basic infrastructure, and the fact that what capitalistic infrastructure there was in russia at the time of the fall of the berlin wall was controlled entirely by organized crime syndicates-- organized crime syndicates who still administer and control significant amounts of the country's economic infrastructure to this day.

But now that i have read your eloquent and intelligent post, i have seen the light. Clearly, as you have shown to us, the fact that russian scientists are poor has nothing to do with the fact the bulk of the country is living on bare subsistence wages to the point that doctors and college professors are making absolutely minimal amounts of money, and the government cannot afford to pay the wages of the troops in its army; it's because Russia's intellectual property laws aren't stringent enough. Thank you for opening my eyes. I understand now that my view of Russia's needs at the moment was misguided; after all, what good would having enough food to go around be, if corporations cannot exercise direct control over the way in which their customers use intellectual property they have purchased?

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GM: Make a Sarcasm roll, d20.
MCC: I am exercising my "shooting fish in a barrel" feat and adding +5 to this roll.

Re:Interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The nature of the software they are making is interesting because:

A) It demonstrates that passwords and encryption in commonly used software _cannot_ be trusted with any sensitive data.

B) It gives people in other countries than the U S(for example Russia) the ability to do backups, which they are entitled to by law in the country they bought the software/eBook/pdf.

DeCSS

[alanjstr]

I still don't see how this is any different than DeCSS. Except this is a company in Russia instead of an individual in Norway. "Software users are entitled by Russian law to make backup copies of software and electronic documents, exactly what the eBook processor allows owners of Adobe eBooks to do." Why have the courts been so stubborn over DeCSS?