He was arrested by the FBI two weeks ago for writing and selling a program that allegedly violates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, just after giving a lecture detailing alleged weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software.
You won't see any discussion of Dmitri Sklyarov on Washington talk shows, the evening news, or the cover of the weekly newsmagazines. Not a single reporter was jailed in those cases, not even for an hour, even though many broke federal and other laws in gathering the information they reported.
When reporters were threatened with law enforcement pressure and jail during the Watergate and Pentagon Papers cases, whole forests were felled in the pre-digital age with stories, books, even movies about courageous reporters fighting for the First Amendment against government oppression. This is the opposite of what copyright law was meant to do. It's a case that has the ugliest implications not only for the press (online and off) but for open discussion of technology, and especially for the First Amendment, now clearly being undermined in the name of copyright protection by the DMCA. The popular media's coverage of the Dmitri Sklyarov case is a scandal.Ģ6-year-old programmer and encryption gadfly Sklyarov has been languishing in jail for almost two weeks now, and the popular media has paid almost no attention to his truly outrageous arrest.
