Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 13:39:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Anders S. Buch" <abuch@math.mit.edu>
Subject: Time to protest!!

Dear Colleagues,
I apologize for using these mailing lists for politics; however, I think that an ongoing case is highly relevant for the future of mathematics in the United States.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from 1998 makes it a crime to "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in" devices which can be used to circumvent copyright protection technology.

Why is this relevant to mathematicians? Because mathematics is an excellent tool for circumventing copy protection schemes, which are usually based on encryption techniques.

It is NOT a mere matter of philosophy that the DMCA is threatening mathematicians. A team of cryptographers led by Professor Felten at Princeton recently withdrew a planned talk (and proceedings paper) at the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh after being threatened with litigation under the DMCA by the Recording Industry Association of America. (See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/)

Even more frightening, last Monday Ph.D. student Dmitry Sklyarov from the Computer Science Department at Moscow University was arrested after giving his talk "eBook Security: Theory and practice" at the DefCon conference in Las Vegas. Sklyarov is accused of giving this talk and for writing a program which breaks the encryption of Adobe e-books. His work on e-book security is part of his Ph.D. dissertation. (See http://www.freesklyarov.org/ and http://www.boycottadobe.org/)

Tomorrow, Monday 7/23, protests are planned in several major US cities, including Boston. The protest in Boston will start at 12:00 noon, the meeting place is outside the Park Street Station exit. See http://freesklyarov.org/boston/ for more information. I will be there, and I strongly encourage any of you who agree that the DMCA is an unfortunate law to come as well!!

Here are some more reasons why the DMCA is bad for mathematics:
1) The DMCA challenges our right to publish our work. Suppose you did the impossible and found and published an easy way to break RSA encryption. This would likely land you a few offers of chair positions at top universities. However, if just one company has used RSA in a copy-protection scheme, then your discovery would be a circumvention tool, and you might end up in prison. Insane???

2) Mathematics in the US benefits from being able to attract the best people from all over the world with a high academic level and an advantageous economy. However, after the recent arrest of Sklyarov, cryptographers might want to think twice before coming to the US. Alan Cox (UK), the top Linux kernel programmer after Linus Torvalds, has recently resigned from the Usenix committee, citing that Usenix meetings take place in the US which is no longer a safe place for foreign programmers. (See http://lwn.net/daily/alan-quits-als.php3)

3) The DMCA is also a tool that publishers could use to make access to electronic Mathematics journals even tighter than it is now. The very program that Sklyarov is accused of defeating, Adobe eBook Reader, only allows the owner of an eBook to read his book on the screen of the computer he purchased it from. It is not possible to make printouts, backup copies, move the book to a laptop, etc. without first breaking the security (Rot-13!!) of Adobe's program. And the DMCA makes this illegal.

I hope to see a lot of you tomorrow, outside Park Street Station at 12:00 noon!!!

Sincerely, Anders Buch

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