Role Reversal: Adobe charged with breaking Russian law?
Scientific American editor contends there may be grounds for winnable class-action suit
20 September 2001
By Kurt Foss, Planet PDF Editor
Update: Sister site Planet eBook has since investigated whether backing up Acrobat eBook Reader eBooks is possible and found that it is. See full details.
If Paul Wallich's theory is correct, Dmitry Sklyarov may yet meet Adobe Systems in court. But it won't be the young ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. programmer who's on trial -- and the courtroom won't be in the United States.
In an opinion piece in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American, Wallich -- the magazine's contributing editor -- contends there's a "bizarre symmetry between ElcomSoft's product and Adobe's."
The referenced ElcomSoft product reportedly developed in part by Sklyarov, is its short-lived Advanced eBook Processor (AEBPR) program. It can be used to decrypt and remove PDF-based eBook permission settings established by the publisher. According to Adobe, that's a violation of a controversial American law -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- that was recently enacted to make circumvention of copyright protection technologies a crime. Sklyarov's supporters have maintained that the AEBPR program is legal in Russia, in part because it allows a person to make a legally mandated back-up copy.
The second piece of Wallich's symmetrical puzzle is Adobe's free programs for reading, viewing and printing PDF files (Acrobat Reader) or PDF-based eBooks (Acrobat eBook Reader). Adobe's digital rights management solution locks a purchased eBook to a specific computer, and does not allow it to be transferred to another computer -- much less to another person (as one could legally do with a primted version of the same book).
Therein lies the criminal act, says Wallich. According to Russian law, he says, a user has the right to make a backup copy, implying that if the program protects against that capability, it's not illegal to circumvent the protection in order to make the legal copy for personal use. He cites a Russian specialist in computer-based law and a law professor in the European Union as supporting his notion that a legal challenge in Russia to any software/company that attempts to circumvent a user's legal rights to copy would stand a good chance of being upheld.
Adobe may want to encourage the U.S. government to resume plea bargaining with Sklyarov, who with his employer have each been indicted on five counts of violating the DMCA.
As Sklyarov noted to one American journalist about his experience in U.S. jails following his July 16 arrest in Las Vegas and eventual transfer to California, Russian jails are much worse.
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