“I’ve just come from the federal courthouse in San Jose, where government prosecutors essentially admitted that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act bans meaningful “fair use” rights for digitally produced content. You can thank Congress for this travesty.”
Gilmour’s talking about the suit against Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and his company ElcomSoft which developed software that circumvents the anti-copying measures in Adobe’s digital book scheme. Adobe first complained to the feds when Sklyarov was in the US at a conference, leading to his arrest. After a shitstorm of protest from the geek community, Adobe urged the gov’t to drop the suit, but the gov’t persisted. Eventually the feds dropped criminal charges against Sklyarov, but are continuing the case against ElcomSoft. Yesterday a federal judge refused to dismiss the suit even though the company is in Russia and not the US. The suit is widely regarded as a major test of the DMCA.
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