If you were wondering where the disability connection is in the russian
programmer incident, the following excerpt from the article below clearly
describes what he did that Adobe found so offensive that it demanded
criminal charges:


What his program did was to
enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions
that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for
Adobe's reader might have imposed. Adobe's eBook Reader, for
example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will
read out loud an appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher
can disable that function for a particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov's
program would enable the purchaser of such a disabled eBook to
overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could use
ElcomSoft's program to listen to a book.

Kelly


Published in The New York Times. July 30, 2001

Jail Time in the Digital Age By LAWRENCE LESSIG


TANFORD, Calif. Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until
recently,  lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal
in  Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer,
ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a  copy
and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that  the program
violated American law and that, by the way, Mr.
Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the
weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software. Two weeks ago,
the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas
jail.

Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America.
Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer
did not violate anyone's copyright. What his program did was to
enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions
that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for
Adobe's reader might have imposed. Adobe's eBook Reader, for
example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will
read out loud an appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher
can disable that function for a particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov's
program would enable the purchaser of such a disabled eBook to
overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could use
ElcomSoft's program to listen to a book.

The problem from Adobe's perspective, however, is that the same
software could enable a pirate to copy an electronic book
otherwise readable only with Adobe's reader technology - then
sell that copy to others without the publisher's permission.
That would be a copyright violation, and it is that possibility
that led Congress to enact the statute that has now landed Mr.
Sklyarov in jail - the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other
technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law
protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble,
however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material
are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law
permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that
protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects
for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.

Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects
copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than
copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would
forgive.

Using software code to enforce law is controversial enough.
Making it a crime to crack that technology, whether or not the
use of that ability would be a copyright violation, is to
delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is precisely what
the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted
material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law
requires.

America is essentially alone in this strategy of
techno-lawmaking. Most nations in the world - including,
importantly for Mr. Sklyarov, Russia - regulate copyright
violations through copyright law, not through laws aimed at code
writers. But what the Sklyarov case means is that this
controversial experiment in the United States now essentially
regulates the world. If you produce and distribute code that
cracks technological protection systems, and that code can be
accessed in the United States, then it's just a matter of time
before our F.B.I. comes knocking at your door.

This is bad law and bad policy. It not only interferes with the
legitimate use of copyrighted material, it undermines security
more generally. Research into security and encryption depends
upon the right to crack and report. Only if weaknesses can be
discovered and described openly will they be fixed.

Increasingly, in the United States, this freedom has been lost.
In April, for example, Edward Felten, a Princeton professor and
encryption researcher, received a letter from recording industry
lawyers warning him that a paper he was about to present at a
conference - it described the weaknesses of an encryption system
- could subject him to enforcement actions under the D.M.C.A..
Mr. Felten understood the threat and decided not to present his
paper. Largely as a result of this experience, he is now the
lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act on First Amendment grounds.

Authors have an important and legitimate interest in protecting
their copyrights. The law should help authors where it can. But
the law should not push its power beyond the protection of
copyright, and the law should especially not criminalize
activities that are central to research in encryption and
security.

Adobe understands this. After extensive meetings with the
nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation - and widespread
protests on the Internet, at Adobe's San Jose, Calif.,
headquarters, in Moscow and elsewhere - Adobe announced it did
not think the prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov was conducive to the
best interests of the parties involved or of the industry.

Yet Mr. Sklyarov still languishes in jail, puzzled, no doubt,
about how a free society can jail someone for writing code that
was legal where written, just because he comes to the United
States and gives a report on encryption weaknesses.

Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, is
author of the forthcoming ``The Future of Ideas'' and a member
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation board.