:The Industry Standard: Adobe Says It Has No Responsibility For Dmitry
The Industry Standard: Adobe Says It Has No Responsibility For Dmitry
Sep 7, 2001, 05 :13 UTC (33 Talkback[s]) (10630 reads) (Other stories by IDG)
"Though he was arrested after Adobe Systems Inc. complained to the U.S. government about a program he had written and the company has since called for charges against him to be dropped, Adobe has no obligation or responsibility to aid indicted Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, Adobe General Counsel Colleen Pouliot said Friday.
Sklyarov, who was arrested for violating the terms of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act in mid-July, was indicted last week for trafficking and conspiring to traffic in tools designed to circumvent copy control technology. If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in prison and up to a $2.25 million. His employer, Moscow-based ElcomSoft Co. Ltd., was also indicted and faces up to $2.5 million in fines.
The program that ran Sklyarov afoul of the law is Advanced eBook Processor, an application that removes restrictions built into Adobe eBook Reader files which allows them to be copied, backed up, printed and more. The DMCA makes it a crime to provide tools or information designed to circumvent these protections. Critics of the DMCA charge that the law is unconstitutional, stifles free speech and abridges consumer rights such as fair use, the ability to lend, borrow or quote from a book, and first sale, the right to resell an item once it has been legally purchased."
