But Dmitry did no wrong; Copyright law.(A clumsy copyright law)(Digital Millennium Copyright Act and academic freedom in Adobe case)(Brief Article)

Economist (US), The, August, 2001

Dmitry's army on the march

A clumsy law lands a Russian programmer in an American jail

BEARDS drooping in the summer fog, 150 computer programmers took to the streets in San Francisco on July 30th to make a protest outside the federal court building. They were rallying in support of Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer arrested by the FBI on July 16th after he delivered a paper at a computer conference in Las Vegas.

Mr Sklyarov was arrested under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law which bans technologies designed to defeat software that protects copyrighted material. Mr Sklyarov, working in Russia, where, as in most countries, such things are not illegal, had written a program that circumvented some of the limits on...

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