Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 09:57:20 +0200
From: David Haworth
To: free@freesklyarov.org
Subject: LETTER: Dear Mr. Boehme,

Hi

I wrote the following letter to Consul General Robert W. Boehme
at the Munich consulate. The LaTeX source (and class file) is available
to anyone who asks.

I should also have added that there's something seriously wrong with
a system that allows the arrest of a citizen based on an unsubstantiated
complaint. Damn - why do I always think of these things just after the
envelope drops into the box.

Anyway, here goes...

Consul General Robert W. Boehme
Consulate General of the United States
Königinstraße 5
80539 München

Dear Mr. Boehme

I am writing to you, as my local representative of the United
States of America, to express my outrage at the recent arrest
and subsequent imprisonment of Mr. Dmitry Sklyarov.

As you may know, Mr. Sklyarov is a Russian programmer and cryptographer
who was visiting your country to make a presentation at a conference.
He was arrested on very dubious grounds after a complaint by Adobe
Corporation. The alleged infringing program was written in Russia,
where the US legislation has no jurisdiction. The distribution
of the program was performed by Mr. Sklyarov's employer, Elcomsoft,
so if any charges of unlawful distribution are to be laid, they
should be against the company, not the programmer. However,
Elcomsoft is also a Russian company, and, it appears, has no
US presence, and so cannot be said to be importing or distributing
the program in the United States. It appears to me that this
is a case of the United States attempting to assert its jurisdiction
outside its territory, which I find arrogant to say the least.

Furthermore, the official complaint against Mr. Sklyarov contains a
number of factual errors. My quotations here are from the HTML
translation of the complaint document available from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) and are quoted
verbatim.

The first obviously false statement appears in part 5b of the
complaint:

`As a result of a series of seamless transactions taking place between
the electronic bookseller, an Adobe Server, and the customer's computer,
users may only open and view the encrypted eBook on the specific computer
that the user utilized to engage in the transaction.'

Clearly this is false, as Mr. Sklyarov has so aptly demonstrated.

The second, from the same paragraph:

`Nevertheless, because the book sold in encrypted form and only
accessible through the eBook Reader and is not duplicatable, the
copyright holder's interest in the book is protected.'

Again, Mr. Sklyarov has demonstrated the falsehood. If these two
claims were true there would be no basis for complaint against
Mr. Sklyarov nor Elcomsoft.

Another, from section 7:

`Nathanson told me that the real damage done by the AEBPR program
is that it creates a "naked file" that enables anyone
to read the eBook on any computer without paying the feed to the bookseller.'

Mr. Nathanson's statement here is false. The damage (if any) is done
when someone unlawfully distributes copies of the book. If someone
has legally purchased an eBook, any so-called damage caused by
that person transferring that book from one computer to another
is a figment of Adobe's corporate imagination.

In conclusion, I therefore demand that the United States release
Mr. Sklyarov immediately and with a full apology. Whether the FBI
would care to press charges against Adobe for falsifying a legal
complaint is a matter for them, but it should be made clear to
US corporations that this kind of behaviour will not be tolerated.

Yours faithfully

--
David Haworth
Germany

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