Artists have joined software programmers and free speech advocates in protesting against the arrest of a Russian man on charges of violating a controversial US copyright law.
About 100 people gathered under cloudy skies in San Francisco carrying a large "Free Dmitry" banner, placards proclaiming "Reading is a Right, not a Feature," and chanting slogans.
The group walked two blocks from a civic plaza across from the public library and City Hall to the federal building where the US Attorney's office is building its case against Dmitry Sklyarov.
A federal official said Sklyarov, 26, is being held in federal detention centre, awaiting transfer on charges of violating the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law prohibits creating or distributing technology that can be used to circumvent copyright protections.
Protesters said the government is using the new law, enacted last year, to expand the rights of copyright holders and publishers at the expense of the free speech rights granted under the US Constitution.
Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas July 16 on charges that a program he wrote, which was temporarily sold by his employer, ElcomSoft of Moscow, violates the new copyright law. It was the first arrest under the new law.
Sklyarov's program allows people purchasing electronic books in digital form to get around controls in Adobe Systems's eBook Reader and make copies of them as well as read them on computers and devices other than the one used to make the purchase.
"Fair use allows people to make use of things freely without the permission of the copyright holder," Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, told the group.
New law
The new copyright law interferes with the fair use provision of existing copyright law, which allows people to copy and re-use limited amounts of copyrighted material for artistic and educational purposes, Gross said.
"I'm a (computer) systems administrator and I'm interested in fair use issues," said 27-year-old Ian Kasley, who said he creates audio collages from "found sounds" for radio shows. The new copyright law is "poisoning the atmosphere for the exchange of free ideas," said Philippe Tapon, a 33-year-old novelist.
"I'm interested in freedom of speech and trying to redress the balance between copyright holders to control information and the lack of the individual's right to challenge that."
The situation is analogous to the protests by movie studios made when videotape recorders were introduced in the 1980s, said Seth Schoen, a programmer, computer consultant and member of the Coalition to Free Dmitry.
In a landmark case, the US Supreme Court ruled that videotaping television shows and movies for personal viewing was constituted fair use.
"There are legitimate uses of this technology," Schoen said of the Sklyarov program. "Publishers just want total control." Researchers are also hindered by the new law, according to security guru Richard Smith.
The new law is "a legal minefield that can trip up anyone investigating the security and privacy features of commercial software products," Smith wrote in an essay published on the Privacy Foundation Web site.
"The Russian people are very angry that one of their programmers is being locked up over a stupid trade dispute with an American company," said Alexander Udalov, a freelance writer covering the protest for Computerra, a weekly computer publication based in Moscow.
People in Russia are worried that the US government will go after ElcomSoft for other programs it sells, most of which allow people to recover lost passwords, including software for Microsoft's Office program, Udalov said.
Sklyarov claims his program is not only legal, but required under Russian law. After initially complaining, Adobe backed off its support last week for the lawsuit against Sklyarov. Sklyarov was arrested after speaking at the DefCon hacker convention about his program.
