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Sklyarov Tells U.S. Court, 'I'm no hacker'
DaytonCIM writes "Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer at the centre of the first Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prosecution, yesterday delivered his long-awaited testimony in the trial of his former employer, ElcomSoft." There are also stories at The Register and on CNET.
Under the DMCA just creating the tool is illegal. It doesn't matter if everyone or no one uses it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The case isn't against Sklyarov. It's against ElcomSoft.
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
Adobe's side of the story.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Back when the Sony-Betamax case was pending Supreme Court review, people asked how it could be that VCR manufacturers could be liable for contributory infringement of copyright simply by providing a tool that some people misused when gun manufacturers were immune from suit by murder victims. There were political cartoons to this effect.
Then the Supreme Court thanfully (it was a close one though, 5-4, I believe, and according to some historians the dissent was originally the majority) gave VCRs a fair use out.
Basically, the Mickey Mouse lobby is invincible. Why should they be deterred by a little logic?
He was picked up at Defcon in Las Vegas, NV, US AFTER a speech he gave about this program, therefore was on US grounds. I believe we held him in a US prison until the last court date, and by that time he made agreements with the US govt.
here http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2002/12/02/BU206051.DTL
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
It should be interesting to hear what the "legitimate uses" sited by these people are.
The same as uses that any company would need: when you have an employee who puts a password on something, and is then fired, the data needs to be recovered. It's actually quite common.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Sklarov doesn't have to care -- it's when Elcomsoft decided to start selling it in the US that they were obliged to know about US Copyright laws. US Software companies have to care if they are violating EU privacy restrictions or they will be sued. I don't think anyone finds that unreasonable.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
But first it used to be against Sklyarov only.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
Basically what Adobe is saying.
- We want elcomsoft to not release software that breaks our unbreakable security software.
No. First, Adobe says right there on the page that no technology can be 100% secure. They say that, when used properly, their software protects copyrighted works. That's all they claim.
They say that they encourage users, including "white hats," to give them feedback on their software and the security thereof.
They say that Elcomsoft broke US law by distributing their software. They say that the US Department of Justice took it upon themselves to make the arrest and to prosecute the case.
Whether or not Adobe's software is perfect isn't even remotely relevant to the issue.
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While the seller doesnt have to guarantee that his books can be read by the blind, the seller cant keep the blind from reading the book, ie using the software to 'open' the book and let him read it. I would like to hear a valid argument against this statement?
The Adobe eBook reader software includes text-to-speech already. Any blind person can use the eBook Reader to read-- or, more accurately, listen to-- any book in the eBook format.
So this is most decidedly not about a blind person's ability to read, or have read to them, anything.
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Does Adobe give users the ability to print out copies of their e-books? If so, then they need to prosecute every manufacture of OCR software that exists.
Wrong. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent effective methods of protection. Once the work has been printed, it is not protected by any device or technology. So scanning those printed pages and OCR'ing them is not illegal under the DMCA. (Of course, you may or may not be violating the copyright itself once you've scanned it, depending on what you do with it.)
I'll say the same thing to you that I've said many times before: before making these kinds of wild-ass statements, please read the DMCA. It's Title 17, chapter 12, of the U.S. Code, and it's available on lots of web sites, including copyright.gov.
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a) isn't charging him with anything, and
b) can't drop charges brought by the state
From the well worded Adobe FAQ (you did check both sides of this story before posting, right?So, in other words, you're annoyed because Adobe is cooperating with the US Government in full accordance of both the spirit and the letter of existing legislation? Shame on them.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
US Code Title 17, Chapter 12, 1201 says (emphasis mine):
(2)
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
(A)
is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
*********************
Check out this article for more.
Yeah, right.
"The point that should concern people (especially those from outside the US) is that they are being tried in the US, under US law for legal actions they committed in another country."
IIRC, he was arrested in the US for something he either just did or was about to do in the US. Something about a demonstration of the flaws in Adobe's encryption system, I believe.
At any rate, the real silliness is in the law itself. You can reverse engineer something, but you can't ever tell anybody how you did it. Which means everybody has to reinvent the wheel for themselves. If that doesn't fly in the face of the original concept of copyrights to begin with (to encourage the dissemination of information), I don't know what does.
Copyright law is supposed to be "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The DMCA is doing the exact opposite. Where can we find a convenient case to take up to the USSC?
If the illegal technology is never trafficed--wow, now there is a word that needs a 'k'
That's why it's spelled with one. Webster's says that the plural of "traffic" is "trafficked," and the participle and gerund forms are both "trafficking."
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Read the whole statute. 17 U.S.C. 1201 (a)(1)(B) basically says that paragraph (A) doesn't apply to people who are attempting to make noninfringing use of a protected work. That hardly qualifies as a "narrow exception."
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Your expert isn't going to see an obstacle at all; he runs the reverse ROT-13 or whatever and boom, there's the file.
A file that has been run through ROT-13 is not readable. It has to be run through ROT-13 again to be readable. So ROT-13 is an effective access control mechanism. You can't access the content until you get around the control mechanism. The fact that the access control mechanism is trivial doesn't matter at all.
The reason for looking at it this way should be obvious. A file that is well-protected today may be only trivially protected in 10 years, thanks to advances in technology. Does that mean that the file is "effectively" protected today, but not "effectively" protected in 2012? That's not cool, from a legal point of view. So the question is not how easy or hard is it to get past the protection mechanism. The question is whether there's one at all. It has to be that way in order to be fair.
Maybe my friend's mom lost her key to a Harry Potter book and can't read it anymore. Her credit is screwed up thanks to a vindictive bellhop in Omaha, so Adobe won't help her.
That's a reach. Why would Adobe care about your friend's mom's credit rating? All she has to do is call technical support; she doesn't have to buy anything new. Not that this invalidates your example, but I want to illustrate that it's harder to come up with a situation in which eBook gets in the way than you might think at first.
What if there is a backdoor password of "Adobe"; is this effective?
Yes. Because in order to access the data, you have to know the password. As long as the password isn't disclosed, this is an effective protection mechanism.
Please try to remember, the legal definition of "effective" is the most literal one: does the prevention mechanism have any effect at all? If the answer is yes, then it is an effective mechanism.
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17 U.S.C. 1201 (a)(1)(B) basically says that paragraph (A) doesn't apply to people who are attempting to make noninfringing use of a protected work. That hardly qualifies as a "narrow exception."
But section 1201 (a)(1)(C) states that only the Librarian of Congress can grant such exceptions.
Will I retire or break 10K?
According to the FBI press release:
"A copy of this press release and key court documents filed in the case may also be found on the U.S. Attorney's Office's website at www.usaondca.com."
Adboe did not misquote the URL. The domain appears to have changed hands as of Nov 25, 2002.
Yes, the eBook reader has numerous optional features like text-to-speech, printing and copying, but those features only work if they haven't been turned off by the publisher. Would you care to defend the legitimacy of the flag that disables text-to-speech feature, and explain why it should trump the fair use rights of the blind consumer?
When the publisher can disable a feature at whim, the feature is better described as a privilege, not a right. Fair use is a right, not a privilege.
It's just a rearranged alphabet. I have a shell set up so I can accomplish certain tasks(chores involving poorly named directories) at work without my network access being suspended.
All you need to do is print out half the alphabet on one line, then, on the next line, print out the other half, directly underneath the first half. Bingo: You have a conversion table.
First you learn certain key phrases, like "terc" for "grep"...After a while, you only need the conversion table occasionally. (I'm still not quite off it.)
What's this Submit thingy do?
By the first definition of the word, Dmitri *is* a hacker, and a good one at that.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Thanks to HR5710, any law enforcement, local, state, or federal, may come into your home and search without first obtaining a warrant.
That's a bald-faced lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Read the bill. It says that agents of the department may execute warrants-- just as they always have-- and that agents of the department may make arrests without warrant under exigent circumstances-- just as they always have.
In other words, if an agent of the agency witnesses you planting a bomb, he can arrest you on the spot without a warrant. The same is true of any police officer in the country; hell, the same is true of any citizen in the country. If you are in active commission of a felony, anybody can detain you until the authorities arrive and take you into custody. These things have always been true before, and are nothing new.
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