While publishers fret over the potential of illegal copies of their books, Sklyarov's presentation reveals that they could be ripped off in an unexpected way: by producers of astonishingly inept cryptography software. Sklyarov is in jail for revealing that secret.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Publishers encrypt their books to prevent them from being read by anyone except the registered owner... they hope. But it turns out that the encryption software of at least two manufacturers is so weak that it can be broken instantly. One publisher, Sklyarov found, uses a cypher called rot13 that has been known since Caesar's time. An encryption vendor uses a cypher so weak that programmers refer to it as the "Hello World" of cryptography programs, and another embeds code key information in the document, so that the key can be found and used to unlock the document instantly.

Let's examine a few of Sklyarov's slides, courtesy of CMU Professor David Touretzky's Web archive. The slides are part of a presentation Sklyarov made two weeks ago at the DEF CON computer security conference. Sklyarov was arrested for distributing software that breaks the simple codes explained in these slides. His software allows you to read your own copy of an e-book using a different program, computer, or operating system than the one you've registered it for. Sklyarov's software is popular with blind people, who use it to feed e-books into speech synthesizers, and with readers who are afraid that their e-books will become unreadable after a computer upgrade or operating system change--a reasonable concern. Sklyarov remains in jail today, even though Adobe Systems Incorporated, which instigated the arrest, later regretted its own action and called for his release. In a New York Times editorial, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig asserts that Sklyarov hasn't broken any law. It's ironic that a Russian had to come to the U.S. to be arrested for what are essentially thought-crimes: allowing people access to books, and exercising his free-speech right by blowing the whistle on inferior products.

Sklyarov's arrest is one of the first under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which lowers an iron curtain on the act of reading or viewing digital media in the United States. The act was prompted by publishers who are afraid of wholesale copying of their work. But the act goes much too far, prohibiting the circumvention of a copy-control device that is necessary simply to read a book or watch a movie, regardless of whether or not the reader is the legitimate owner of their copy. DMCA proponents use the act to restrict your fair-use rights under copyright law: among them the right to read or view your own copy of the media, the right to sell a used book, lend it to a friend, or check it out of the library, and even the right to re-read a book without paying an additional fee. One of the earliest e-books was a textbook that expired and became unreadable at the semester's end, so that the students would not be able to resell it at the college bookstore.

If you are able to read an e-book with your own software, rather than the licensed program of the publisher, you might be able to circumvent these restrictions, or you could make illegal copies that can be read by others. So, DMCA proponents say, you must be prohibited from reading your own media with your own software. But they are ignoring the fact that the government grants the copy right to publishers in exchange for rights that the publishers grant the people, including fair use rights and the transition of a work into the public domain as a copyright expires. For decades, publishers have successfully lobbied to extend the duration of copyrights, so that their work would never enter the public domain. DMCA is a step against the remaining fair-use rights, completely skewing the balance of rights in the publisher's favor.

Sklyarov's slide show

Contents
	1. Dmitry Sklyarov: Enemy or friend?	2. Sklyarov's slide show

Visit the Linux Update Center

[an error occurred while processing this directive]