Case 1: United States v. Sklyarov

The concerns for the expansion of copyright and limitation of user rights were reflected by the heated discussion on the case of United States v. Sklyarov. Sklyarov was the first person to be charged criminal under DMCA (n1). In the summer of 2001, this 26-year-old Russian programmer was arrested by FBI at the Las Vegas computer hacker convention known as Def Con, where he was speaking about his graduate thesis on e-book security (Lee, 2001b). Sklyarov helped his employer, ElcomSoft of Moscow, wrote a program that converts Adobe eBooks – electronic documents that cannot be copied or e-mailed – into files that can be easily duplicated and shared online. Sklyarov created part of the program as part of his doctoral work at Moscow State Technical University. This software was then sold by ElcomSoft on the Internet for $99 per copy (Kirby, 2001a). Adobe complained to the FBI that the software violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which caused the arrestment of Sklyarov and indictment of Sklyarov and ElcomSoft. At the end of the same year, Adobe withdrew charge of Sklyarov from this case, possibly due to the large protests against the case (Kirby, 2001b) and the black cloud of attacks by an enraged hacker community (Roush, 2001). One year and a half later, ElcomSoft was also acquitted of charges by a federal jury in San Jose (Kirby, 2002).

See Case One Analysis

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