Build Date: Mon Jan 12 23:00:10 2026 UTC
The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.
-- Lester Bangs
Russian Programmer Imprisoned for DMCA Violations
2001-07-18 11:03:21
Yesterday the U.S. busted a Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov for breaking the infamous DMCA act. It is not really clear to me if Dmitry was jailed (and he is currently sitting in a Las Vegas jail) for writing a piece of code that defeats Adobe's PDF file encryption schema or for talking about it at the notorious hacker convention, Defcon, held this year in Las Vegas.
Both acts violate the DMCA.
And in both cases, I'm appalled.
That, one, the U.S. has jailed someone for creating content it disagrees with while they were outside the United States. This is horrible and sets a precedent that is truly frightening. How would you like to be responsible for anything and everything that you've ever created in every jurisdiction in the world? That scares the hell out of me, as after some of the crap I've written, I probably qualify for the death sentence in several dozen Middle Eastern countries.
Or, two, the absolute irony that a former Soviet citizen was arrested for speaking his mind while in the United States. Whatever happened to free speech? I thought WE won the Cold War.
While I do love the theory that America was founded on, I have to say that I'm becoming less and less enamored with the way in which the ideals of our founding fathers are being implemented and put into practice. That people in our government even remotely think that the DMCA doesn't violate the First Amendment is truly an indictment of the absolute corruption that corporate soft money has wrought on this once fine system.
It should be pointed out that because Adobe's encryption scheme doesn't permit the user to make at least one copy, it is currently breaking Russian copyright law. Horrors. A U.S. company breaking the law? We can't have that.
So I urge the Russian government to immediately begin legal proceedings to extradite the entire management team at Abode and then send them all to Siberia to count trees. Not because I feel that people should be imprisoned for breaking copyright law, but because I believe in poetic justice.
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