The Industry Standard: Adobe Says It Has No Responsibility For Dmitry

“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.”

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