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Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 13:02:29
-0600 Subject: Free Dmitri Sklyarov Senator Nighthorse Campbell, A Russian programmer -- a graduate
student and father of two -- is sitting in an American jail for a speech
made in the United States and writings made in Russia. Dmitry Sklyarov
is the victim of overly aggressive censorship policies, prosecution and
litigation encouraged by poorly drafted DMCA -- erasing our rights to
fair use and open discussion of subjects. Please see that he is freed,
given an official apology, obtain an FBI pledge to end similar infringements
of the free speech rights of individuals foreign nationals or otherwise,
and revisit and revoke the sweeping restrictions of our free speech and
fair use rights caused by the DMCA. Half a century ago Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was jailed in the Soviet Union for writings in the code of allegory that offended the masters of the Soviet oppression. Now a Russian sits in an American jail for speeches made on American soil and writings in the code of software that offended an American corporation. Surely we have not fallen to so great an extent that this could be the official, continuing policy of the United States of America. Thank you for your attention
to this matter, Background: His crime was writing and speaking
about software (the subject of his PhD thesis) that allows owners of electronic
books to make legal "fair use" of them. The FBI acting on a
complaint by Adobe Technologies arrested Mr. Sklyarov after he attended
technical conference and presented the "illegal" speech regarding
the flaws in Adobe software products. Adobe claims this speech (both the
presentation and software All of this stems from an overly
aggressive application of the DMCA by the US DOJ and the FBI at the urging
of a large American corporation. There is a reasonable approach
to copyright law in the "digital millennium", one that pursues
the criminal, commercial pirate but that leaves the "fair use"
and free speech rights of the citizenry intact. To date the US DOJ has
taken the most aggressive and oppressive reading of the current law, pursuing
tools and research intended to help the common citizen get the greatest
use from legally owned copies of copyright materials -- while doing nothing
to stop actual, commercial and criminal piracy. It is time that the US DOJ
and the FBI stopped pursuing software which enables users to exercise
"fair use" rights for digital media and instead focus on the
future "Napsters" and other wholesale, large scale commercial
digital piracy operations. While this may require a change of law, even Senators communicating their shock over the overly aggressive application of the DMCA could help in the near term.
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