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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.
If you can get arrested for providing someone with the tools to commit a crime, how come this does not apply to anything but the software/electronics area. For example gun manufacturors do not face such action for providing people with items that could be used in a crime. even a shoe could be used to kill somebody :-)
Bigger for those of us who are not yet on trial, probably not as big for the guy on trial. Here's the thing: the legal system, as in copyright law, is so far behind the technology that it can't quite cope with what's going on. It doesn't matter what the law _is_. We have to start thinking about what the law will be. Lessig's idea that the law will be code, or rather that code will supplant law seems appropriate to think of here.
The question I have is this: what's the next frontier? What is the next law which proves to be obsolete in our world? And what will each of us do to bring about the change? This last bit is important because, as the laws need to grow, someone will have to help them along. Those people who help the change, will likely be prosecuted because the law is there to protect someone's interests. Those interests come with a lot of money. So the law is on the old money side. The code, it seems to me, is on the new money side. I don't believe that code will lead to free (beer). There will be free stuff, but there will also be money. My guess is that it won't be the money of the blue chips unless law beats code.
I'm rambling now. Time to shut up.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
ElcomSoft Managing Director Vladmir Katalov took the stand after Sklyarov. He testified that ElcomSoft, which also makes password-retrieval software, has many major customers for its products, including Adobe and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now this is an interesting twist. I didn't know anything about ElcomSoft itself. This is like blaming the guys who make the tools used to extract keys from locked cars. Everyone curses the wind wishing they're around when you get locked out.
Who here has not scrambled for a NT Admin password recovery disk, or a ZIP password cracker, or swapped NVRAM chips between Suns?
They don't hide behind pretenses... they expose the poor security and help you when you are hindered by said annoyances! I believe there is insufficient evidence to make Sklyarov appear malicious, and he had little to gain personally. He exposed the information that would only be profitable within the confines of the company and his product to the public. Moreover, he warned potential publishers that the protected PDFs weren't safe. Therefore, the only person that loses out is the lazy programmers at Adobe. And he claims to be ignorant of the legal ramifications. AND WHY SHOULD HE, HE'S A FRIGGIN RUSSIAN CITIZEN (Spare me the IN SOVIET RUSSIA... replies).
I hope to GOD that the DMCA doesn't get used to uphold lazy habits.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Wow, they just fundamentally don't get it:
The whole point of fair use and its ilk is that it does not require permission from the copyright holder. If I have to beg for my fair use rights, then they have been stolen from me. Forget free speech, this case is about the basic rights to own and use one's private property.
In one of Lessig's speeches, he lists the absurd restrictions on an eBook of a work in the public domain. Who do these people think they are?!
There are examples of controlled dual-use "tools" such as explosives and locksmithing devices. (There's a federal statute specifically for the latter, though it is a bit vague and I doubt often enforced; non-Hollywood burglars usually use less finesse :).
Obviously you can get arrested as a conspirator, accessory, or accomplice to a crime. But liability goes further, it depends on your knowledge and exercise of due care.
You can get in trouble for supplying a gun to someone knowing they intend to use it for a crime; you can be liable for joyriders crashing your car after you left the keys in the ignition; there is even liability for serving one drink too many to someone before they go driving ("dram shop laws"). Said liability may be civil or criminal depending on the jurisdiction and the circumstances.
Before anyone says these sorts of liability are unfair in some abstract sense of causality, I'll add that the rules were developed in an effort to reduce the overall misery by allocating responsibility efficiently and reducing opportunities for mischief. So it has less to do with condemning anyone than with dry economics. Of course the details are open to debate.
As for shoes, well, they've been trying to get stiletto heels over 3" banned outright for years. (I'm kidding -- but I wonder if you can still take them on an airplane?)
I *hope* this is what you were asking about!
Forget free speech, this case is about the basic rights to own and use one's private property.
Did you know that copyright holders are not required to do anything at all in order to ensure that users of their works can exercise all-- or even any!-- of the possible fair uses of their works?
Did you know that, under the DMCA, it is not illegal to circumvent copy protection mechanisms for the purpose of making fair use of a work? [17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1)(B)]
Did you know that this case rests on the DMCA's prohibition of the importation or sale of devices whose sole purpose is to circumvent copy protection? [17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2)]
Did you know that most people who complain with zeal that the DMCA is a bad law have never actually read it, or indeed any part of Title 17?
Just some legal trivia for y'all to chew on.
I write in my journal
I just killed an Adobe Pagemaker sale today. No fanfare, no big deal, I just wrote "denied" on the purchase request and sent it back. I told him to find something else, and as long as it's not from Adobe I'll sign off on it.
That one's for you, Jon. And so's the next one. And the one after that. And as many as it takes until Adobe fully appreciates the delicacy of vendor-customer relationships, and acknowledges who's really in charge.
I don't believe it. They use overbroad copyright statements - putting Copyright 1999 on a copy of 1912 book where they only thing they added was the introduction - but minor changes in the US don't matter - from the copyright office's FAQ:
If you read the text of the DMCA, one of the issues is whether the copy protection is "effective." And I'm surprised that Elcomsoft's attorney apparently didn't make some hay out of that.
"Effective" doesn't mean "really good." It just means that the mechanism does, on its face, restrict access to the work. It's not a question of how easy or hard it is to get around it. It's a question of whether it presents an obstacle at all.
This analogy isn't perfect, but I think it'll serve. Imagine that a policeman comes to your house. You have the severed head of your last victim in your freezer, and you decide (for whatever reason) to leave your freezer door open. The policeman walks in, sees the severed head in plain sight, and arrests you on the spot.
On the other hand, what if you had closed the freezer door? If the policeman had opened your freezer, seen the severed head, and then arrested you, your lawyer would immediately start drafting a motion to suppress evidence. If a policeman looks around and sees a severed head in plain sight, that's not a search and requires no warrant. If, on the other hand, he opens your freezer and finds the head, that's a search, and it requires a warrant in order to be legal.
The question of whether your freezer is a good place to hide things or not never comes into it. The point is that you had the severed head behind closed doors. That's all it takes.
This is the same thing. The important fact is that the content of the work is hidden behind an access control mechanism such that you have to circumvent it in order to get to the content. Even if the process of circumvention is trivial-- like opening a freezer door-- it's still circumvention, and (mostly) prohibited.
I write in my journal
Under the DMCA just creating the tool is illegal. It doesn't matter if everyone or no one uses it.
Isn't the DMCA a USA law ??? Sklyarov did all his programming in Russia ..
Is copyright protection realy worth living in a world where a foreign national can sue a individual/company in another country for breaking laws in his country ? Like THIS ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
So ROT-13 is most definitely an effective access control mechanism; you can't read it
Which brings us to an excellent point. It is pretty easy to learn to read ROT-13. And once you do learn it, it's virtually impossible to not do so any time you see it.
I have made zero effort to learn ROT-13, yet it took me about 2 seconds to recognize the phrase "All your base are belong to us" when I saw it posted in ROT-13. I even spotted that there was a typo in it, though I couldn't tell offhand what the typo changed it to.
I'm sure if I really worked at it I could become semi-fluent in reading ROT-13 within a day or so.
What are the DMCA implications of this? Of learning to decrypt something in your head? Because it *IS* possible to do DeCSS this way, though it would be quite an impressive feat.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.