DMCA Community Declaration

July 25th, 2001

As many of you know, a programmer has been arrested for developing a utility to circumvent copy protection schemes in some of Adobe's products. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes the practice of developing (not using, but developing!) such utilities illegal.

There is a community declaration regarding the DMCA online which has already been signed by the Debian Project Leader and SPI president as well as many other community leaders and members. This declaration states the basic problems with the DMCA, and addresses why such a law should not exist.

We urge you to go to the web site of the declaration and, if you agree with the statements regarding the DMCA, to sign it. The web site is:

http://www.dibona.com/dmca

For more information regarding the history of this issue, please visit the following two sites:

http://www.freesklyarov.org/

http://www.boycottadobe.com/

Free Speech, Free Sklyarov

Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian academic, has been imprisoned after presenting a scientific paper at the DEF CON computer security conference. His talk covered the restriction mechanisms used to prevent people from reading electronic books. He was formally charged with distributing software that could be used to circumvent copy protection.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act attacks freedom of speech and assembly and damages the economic health of the United States.

Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI outside his hotel as he prepared to go to the airport. The arrest was instigated by Adobe Systems Corporation.

It is ironic that a Russian national is being held without bail in the US for what is essentially a thoughtcrime. Through the passage of the DMCA we have criminalized speech and scientific research about the structure of computer programs as well as other simple acts such as reading of books and other media.

The DMCA goes far beyond the need to protect from illegal copies of books and other media. Since it criminalizes not only the act of copying but even development and possession of programs which are capable of reading these media for legitimate use. For example, the DMCA criminalizes used book stores, in that the DMCA helps publishers lock up books so tight that the electronic analog of a used book store would be impossible.

This is not the first time that DMCA has been used as a weapon against legitimate scientific research. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has brought suit on behalf of USENIX and Princeton Professor Edward Felten after the Professor and his research team were threatened with DMCA prosecution by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). This threat was delivered after it became known that Professor Felten was presenting a paper showing the insecurity of a method of protecting music, just as Sklyarov was arrested after presenting a similar paper about electronic books.

The DMCA, in spite of its supposed exception, punishes reverse engineering. Bans on reverse engineering the BIOS ROMs in the 70s would have made the PC revolution (and companies like Compaq, Phoenix and Dell) illegal.

The extremism of the DMCA provisions prohibiting research, development and publication of tools for distributing and displaying copyrighted works must be eliminated. These provisions drop an Iron Curtain on the United States of America. It should never be illegal to make or discuss such tools.

Noted Signatories(see 5501 other signatories to the declaration):

Care to join them?

Sign your name to this declaration as well.

Please see the 5501 other signatories to the declaration.

Press Contacts:

Please note that all of the Press Contacts will be available for discussion at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference the week of the 22nd of July.

Resources:

The EFF page on Sklyarov: http://www.eff.org/
The EFF page on Edward Felten: http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/Felten_v_RIAA/
The Free-Sklyarov Mailing list: http://zork.net/mailman/listinfo/free-sklyarov 

Copyright 2001