Last week, in an action instigated by Adobe, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Russian programmer Dmitri Skylarov. Skylarov is accused of violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Basically, Adobe has a copyprotection scheme which encrypts PDF files. The system has a number of weaknesses, however, and Sklarov wrote a program that can quickly remove such copy protection measures.
A lot of the debate over the arrest online focuses on the DMCA and the elimination of “fair use.” For example, there are a number of programs which read aloud the text of documents for blind people (or anyone else for that matter). The encryption system used by Adobe typically renders such programs useless, even though such use clearly falls within the fair use provision of traditional copyright law — proving the main point of DMCA critics, that the end result of the legislation will be to eliminate any sort of fair use.
What really concerns me, however, is an issue that I haven’t really seen discussed. This program was created in and is sold by a company based in Russia where the DMCA does not apply. American companies, U.S. citizens and many politicians have been concerned that countries with restrictive speech laws would go after Internet communications that originate in the United States where laws are generally more expansive.
But here the shoe is on the other foot — the United States is attempting to legally enforce its copyright laws on a product that is completely legal to produce and sell within the country it was created.
This is definitely not the road the United States should be going down. In fact, you have to wonder if prosecutors in France and Germany aren’t licking their chops. After all both countries have brought cases against American Internet-based companies such as Yahoo! and Amazon on the grounds that the companies weren’t doing an effective job of not selling illegal contraband (such as books) that are legal in the U.S. but illegal in Germany. Prosecuting Skylarov simply buttresses the legal arguments made by those governments that they can prosecute a business for engaging in activities that are completely legal within a company’s home country.
It will be interesting to see how the United States would react if, say, Jeff Bezos went on vacation to Saudi Arabia and was arrested for violating Saudi Arabian law. Or if some police agency in India set a similar trap for Yahoo!’s Terry Semel for real or imagined slights against Hindus on Yahoo!’s discussion boards.
Sklyarov’s arrest really sets a dangerous precedent in this area.