LISNews: Librarian News

Jailed Russian programmer and international cause célèbre Dmitri Sklyarov was released this afternoon:

Russian software programmer Dimitry Sklyarov, whose July 16 arrest on U.S. copyright charges provoked a firestorm of debate over Internet free speech, was released on $50,000 bail on Monday by a California court. Sklyarov, 26, was released into the custody of Sergei Osokine of nearby Cupertino, Calif., after his Moscow-based company, ElcomSoft Co., put up the $50,000 bond, court officials said. Sklyarov appeared in court for the bail hearing, looking tired and wearing orange prison-issued clothing. Outside the court, a small group of protesters demonstrated, saying his arrest was a violation of free speech rights. [More from Yahoo News.]

Scooped again by Slashdot.

Copyright scholar (and Electronic Frontier Foundation board member) Lawrence Lessing neatly skewers the DMCA:

The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit. Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive. (More from the New York Times.)

A tip of the pen to Metafilter.

Wired Is Reporting the coalition of public libraries, library patrons and website operators that filed the challenge in March against the Children\'s Internet Protection Act of 2000 may get its\' day in court, next February.

The Justice Department, which is representing
the Federal Communications Commission and
the Institute of Museum and Library Services
in the suit, asked a federal court in
Philadelphia to dismiss the case saying the
challenge is without merit.

They must be too busy praying in the office to have the time to actually defend this one.

\"\"There are a zillion issues here,\" Chief Judge
Edward Becker of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals told a team of Justice Department attorneys during
an hour-long hearing.\"

Slashdot just posted a follow up on the big eBook Arrest

In one of the first cases of criminal prosecution under a 1998 federal digital copyright law [The DMCA], a 27-year-old Russian cryptographer was arrested at a Las Vegas hotel on Monday morning, a day after giving a presentation to a large convention of computer hackers on decrypting the software used to protect electronic books.

Dmitri Sklyarov, who was being held in Las Vegas without bail, is being charged with one count of trafficking in software to circumvent copyrightable materials and one count of aiding and abetting such trafficking.

What he did wrong seems to read like what librarians do every day.

\"Nathanson told me that the real damage done by the AEBPR program is that it creates a \"naked file\" that enables anyone to read the eBook on any computer without paying the feed to the bookseller. Only one legitimate copy of the encrypted eBook needs to be purchased originally and after the protections are stripped through the usage of the Elcomsoft program, there are no restrictions and the eBook can be duplicated freely and made available for usage on any computer.\"
Read The Complaint and see what you think.