Word: sklyarov
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Unlike most tourists in the mid-July Nevada heat, Dmitri Sklyarov did not come to Las Vegas for the casinos. He hates the noise, and besides, as a computer scientist he knows how low the odds are of winning. "I use my head and my hands to make money, not waiting for luck," Sklyarov explains in broken English. So there were really only two highlights of his visit: the part where he spoke at the Def Con computer-security conference, and the part at the end where he got handcuffed and led away...
...reason for his arrest, say federal investigators, was in the suitcase he was carrying. Not bombs or secret government documents, but software to make other kinds of documents--electronic books--less than secret. Working for Moscow-based ElcomSoft while finishing his Ph.D., Sklyarov had used his head and hands to write code that cracks the security on an e-book reader sold by software giant Adobe. What Sklyarov did is perfectly legal in the rest of the world, and it was legal here until last year. "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Sklyarov told TIME...
...rule, computer geeks might best be described as laid-back libertarians--they don't like laws encroaching on their territory, but they're usually too busy to care. Sklyarov's arrest changed all that. Since the DMCA makes it a criminal offense merely to make the tools that some hacker might use to crack security on a copyrighted document, hundreds of programmers suddenly feared they might also fall afoul of it. "I've been a programmer for 10 years, and this is the kind of thing you have to do all the time," says Evan Prodromou, one of the organizers...
...Indeed, the boycott is over. While Sklyarov will be arraigned on Aug. 23, most legal experts say the federal case against him will be tough to prove without Adobe's help. The charge filed by the government against Sklyarov is confusing enough: it is for "trafficking" software prohibited by the DMCA. This does not mean he went around selling it himself, but rather that Adobe was able to buy it through a third party--and his name was listed on that software's copyright page. Yes, that is as tenuous as it sounds. "I hope the government knows something...
...Sklyarov, the three weeks until his bail hearing last Monday were a whirl of jails: federal detention centers in Nevada, Oklahoma and California. Though separated from his wife, two-year-old son and four-month-old daughter back in Moscow, Sklyarov was typically upbeat about his imprisonment. He read mystery and romance novels to improve his English and felt he was learning a lot about U.S. society: "When you watch American movies, you see the policeman arrest somebody and read him his rights and that's all, but it's very interesting what happens after...