Adobe DMCA protests spread to UK

Why is Dmitry still in jail?

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 31st July 2001 12:51 GMT

Free whitepaper – Dell solid state disk (SSD) drives

Protests against the arrest of jailed Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have spread oversees. The US Embassy lobby in London will be the focus of a demonstration this coming Friday August 3.

As Stanford's Lawrence Lessig pointed out in yesterday's New York Times, Sklyarov broke no copyright laws, nor did he steal any 'intellectual property'. But he did publish details of how Adobe's flawed eBook encryption program may be circumvented, and so falls foul of the US DMCA.

Demonstrations continue, with more taking place in twenty cities across the United States yesterday. Speaking from the San Jose rally Electronic Frontier Foundation's Intellectual Property Attorney Robin Gross told The Register that Government lawyers had listened 'carefully' to the case put by the EFF last week, but that without strong congressional support opposition to Sklyarov's arrest and the DMCA would continue in the form of direct action.

"The DMCA is being used not to protect copyright but to smash Adobe's competition," she told us.

Um, but didn't Adobe go after Sklyarov after he'd published the recipe for eBook encryption?

"You can't legislate against the laws of physics," she told us. "If something can be copied it will."

Details of the UK demonstration will be posted here, although the specifics weren't online when we looked this morning. ®