Adobe Jail (fwd)

[Eugene Leitl]

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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ICBMTO  : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 08:44:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tom <tomwhore at inetarena.com>
To: fork at xent.com
Subject: Adobe Jail


I report on this over at Plesant[1] yesterday but todays update is pretty
damn amazing, So I will recap the old and new story here.

"The Battle of the Ebooks rages on. Adobe is trying hard to be the leader
of the Secure Ebook initiative on the web, selling the idea that
publishing companies can securely sell their books over the web as PDF
files while keeping those files locked to anyone but the person who
purchased them. The problem is, the files are far from secure. The good
folks at ELCOMSOFT[2] are proving this with some great reasoned
explanations and some sample code which in the end show that Adobe's
security is open for copying. Adobes response, at first, is to try to shut
down ELCOMSOFT rather than their own security problems. This whole battle
is also part of the ongoing fight over wether its legal for a person to
make a back up copy of something they purchase, be it a cassette tape, dc,
dvd, software or ebook. The copyright laws [3] used to allow this but now
thanks to the Bono Laws and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [4] this
is being phased out in favor of the publishers holding total control over
what and when and how a copy can be made. Its fascinating to watch all
this play out over the course of decades running from Fair Use [5] to
Fairly Usless[4].

said Tom Higgins on Monday, July 16, 2001


Then this morning I read this over at Slashdot[6]

"Posted by michael on Tuesday July 17, @08:09AM from the
welcome-to-the-U.S.,-now-go-to-jail dept.
Richard and many other people sent in news about Dmitry Sklyarov, a
programmer at Russian software company Elcomsoft, who was arrested after
giving a talk at Def Con 9 in Las Vegas titled "eBook Security: Theory and
Practice."[7] Elcomsoft publishes a program to remove restrictions from
encrypted PDF files, which has severely annoyed Adobe Corporation. Adobe
was apparently responsible for the arrest, charging that Elcomsoft is
violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by publishing the software
and giving the presentation at Def Con. (The presentation, by the way, is
great - he compares the claimed features of ebook protection schemes with
their actual features.) Also at Def Con 9: Hacking for Human Rights. "


[1] http://www.pleasant.blogspot.com/
[2] http://www.elcomsoft.com/aebpr.html
[3] http://www.copyright.gov/
[4] http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html
[5] http://www.negativland.com/intprop.html#copyright
[6] http://slashdot.org/yro/01/07/17/130226.shtml
[7] http://www.download.ru/defcon.ppt

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