[wordup] (no subject)

[Adam Shand]

more on the russian hacker arrested at defcon for dcma violations.

URL: http://securitygeeks.shmoo.com/article.php?story=20010719141720141

Focus On What's Important in the Sklyarov Case
July 19 2001 @ 02:17PM
Contributed by: jon

I've been reading a number of things about the latest DMCA brouhaha, the
arrest of Russian grad student Dmitry Sklyarov. People have been
hashing over the DMCA problems, even while saying that the thing they want
most is to get Skylarov out of jail.

There are several issues at hand:

(1) The DMCA.
(2) What Sklyarov allegedly did.
(3) The way the FBI handled it.

If you want to get Sklyarov out of jail, you need to focus on (2) and (3),
and forget about (1) for the time being. (1) has been around for years,
and
it will be around for years more. It's going to be a long fight, folks,
and the issues are complex.

The place to focus, in my opinion, is (3). Sklyarov may have done
something that is illegal in the US. But he did it in his native land,
where it is not
illegal. His company even cooperated with the complaint against them, by
removing the offending program from their site. That shows that they're
not being mere pirates. One of the Russians who has been commenting said
that they don't arrest sheikhs who come to Russia for having more
than one wife, despite bigamy being illegal in Russia. I thought that was
very well said, and goes to the heart of the issue.

Next, the FBI acted heavy-handedly. They *could* have denied him entry
into the US. They *could* have just put him on a plane and said, "Don't
come back." Instead, they prepared an arrest in anticipation for him to
come to the US to present a paper. *That* is scary for all people -- if
countries start arresting travelers for things they did in their native
land, we're all in trouble. This is a very bad precedent. On a larger
scale, this
sort of thing weakens our ability to chastise places on human rights
issues. There have been times when Americans visiting abroad have been
arrested, and the US government usually considers these to be human rights
violations. It makes it hard for us to get our own people out of other
prisons if we run around jailing grad students for not being up on US law.

I also mention here that if you are one of the people who like the DMCA,
you should still be upset. One reason is that these procedural things take
away from the merits of the case. Making an example out of a foreigner who
happened to travel to the US only plays into the hands who oppose the
DMCA. (And as one of those, I have to say thanks, guys!) Another is that
this will probably blunt further implementation of the WIPO treaty in
other countries; you really wanted your test case to be a real criminal,
not an academic. Those of us who have been opposing WIPO brought up
things like this, and we were assured that legitimate researchers won't be
harassed. Well, guys, the first two people bothered were a full professor
at Princeton, and a grad student from Moscow. And you should also be
worried about the issue below.

Lastly, it appears that the government has not followed accepted
international procedures. We don't really know, since we're sitting here
in an
information vacuum. The much bigger issue is whether the DMCA is so
important to the US that we're going to make an international incident
over
it.

Stressing *these* things may get Sklyarov out of jail, and you may even
get the pro-DMCA forces to help.