Dmitry is nothing more than a paid employee of a legal and ethical business in the Russian Republic, which makes devices to make Adobe E-books legal to possess in Russia. Russia, in response to terible abuse of information channels in the past, has a strange law which forbids the selling of any device which doesn't guarantee a minimum of Fair Use aceess to published works.

Adobe's ebook is in violation of Russian Law. Dmitry is just a hired programmer working for ElcomSoft. He made a speech here in the US on E-Book Security and was arrested.

Dmitry was arrested for violating a US Law which destroys the Democratic Freedom while being a simple employee for a company producing a product which guarantees and complies with laws in Russia designed to protect their fledgling democracy.

Is this the Twiight zone or What? See this NYTimes Article

----- Forwarded message from Bill Evans  -----

This from the U.S. Att'y. in SFO:


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 13, 2001

        The United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District
of California announced  that Dmitry Sklyarov entered into an
agreement this morning with the United States and admitted his conduct
in a hearing before U.S. District Judge Whyte in San Jose Federal
Court.

        Under the agreement, Mr. Sklyarov agreed to cooperate with the
United States in its ongoing prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov's former
employer, Elcomsoft Co., Ltd.  Mr. Skylarov will be required to appear
at trial and testify truthfully, and he will be deposed in the matter.
For its part, the United States agreed to defer prosecution of Mr.
Sklyarov until the conclusion of the case against Elcomsoft or for one
year, whichever is longer.  Mr. Sklyarov will be permitted to return
to Russia in the meantime, but will be subject to the Court's
supervision, including regularly reporting by telephone to the
Pretrial Services Department.  Mr.  Sklyarov will be prohibited from
violating any laws during the year, including copyright laws.  The
United States agreed that, if Mr. Sklyarov successfully completes the
obligations in the agreement, it will dismiss the charges pending
against him at the end of the year or when the case against Elcomsoft
is complete.

        Mr. Sklyarov, 27, of Moscow, Russia, was indicted by a federal
Grand Jury on August 28, 2001.  He was charged with one count of
conspiracy in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371,
and two counts of trafficking for gain in technology primarily
designed to circumvent technology that protects a right of a copyright
owner in violation of Title 17, United States Code, Section
1201(b)(1)(A), and two counts of trafficking for gain in technology
marketed for use in circumventing technology that protects a right of
a copyright owner in violation of Title 17, United States Code,
Section 1201(b)(1)(A).

        In entering into the agreement with the government, Mr.
Sklyarov was required to acknowledge his conduct in the offense.  In
the agreement, Mr.  Sklyarov made the following admissions, which he
also confirmed in federal court today:

"Beginning on a date prior to June 20, 2001, and continuing through
July 15, 2001, I was employed by the Russian software company,
Elcomsoft Co. Ltd.  (also known as Elcom Ltd.) (hereinafter
"Elcomsoft") as a computer programmer and cryptanalyst.


"Prior to June 20, 2001, I was aware Adobe Systems, Inc. ("Adobe") was
a software company in the United States.  I was also aware Adobe was
the creator of the Adobe Portable Document Format ("PDF"), a computer
file format for the publication and distribution of electronic
documents.  Prior to June 20, 2001, I knew Adobe distributed a program
titled the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader that provided technology for the
reading of documents in an electronic format on personal computers.
Prior to June 20, 2001, I was aware that documents distributed in the
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader format are PDF files and that
specifications of PDF allow for limiting of certain operations, such
as opening, editing, printing, or annotating.


"Prior to June 20, 2001, as a part of my dissertation work and as part
of my employment with Elcomsoft, I wrote a part of computer program
titled the Advanced eBook Processor ("AEBPR").  I developed AEBPR as a
practical application of my research for my dissertation and in order
to demonstrate weaknesses in protection methods of PDF files.   The
only use of the AEBPR is to create an unprotected copy of an
electronic document.  Once a PDF file is decrypted with the AEBPR, a
copy is no longer protected by encryption.  This is all the AEBPR
program does.


"Prior to June 20, 2001, I believed that ElcomSoft planned to post the
AEBPR program on the Internet on the company's website
www.elcomsoft.com.  I believed that the company would charge a fee for
a license for the full version of the AEBPR that would allow access to
all capabilities of the program.


"After Adobe released a new version of the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader
that prevented the initial version of the AEBPR program from removing
the limitations or restrictions on an e-book, I wrote software
revisions for a new version of the AEBPR program. The new version
again decrypted the e-document to which it was applied.  The version
of this new AEBPR program offered on the Elcomsoft website only
decrypted a portion of an e-document to which it was applied, unless
the user had already purchased a fully functional version of the
earlier version and had both versions installed on the same machine.
The new version was developed after June 29, 2001. At that time,
Elcomsoft had already stopped selling the program. The version of this
new program offered on the Elcomsoft website did not provide a user
with an opportunity to purchase it or convert it to a fully functional
one, and was developed as a matter of competition.

"On July 15, 2001, as part of my employment with Elcomsoft, I attended
the DEF CON Nine conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.  At the conference I
made a presentation originally intended for the BlackHat conference
that immediately preceded the DefCon Nine in July 2001 in Las Vegas,
Nevada.  The same group of people organizes both BlackHat and DefCon
Nine.  Since there was no available slot for a presentation at
BlackHat at the time when the paper was sent for the committee
consideration, the organizers of both conferences suggested that the
paper be presented at the DefCon rather than at BlackHat.  The paper
that I read at DefCon is attached as  Exhibit A.  A principal part of
my presentation is comprised of my research for the dissertation.  In
my presentation when I said "we", I meant Elcomsoft."

        Mr. Sklyarov's employer, Elcomsoft, remains charged in the
case, and the Court in that matter has set hearings for various
motions on March 4, 2002, and April 1, 2002.

        The prosecution of Elcomsoft is the result of an
investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scott Frewing
and Joseph Sullivan of the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property
("CHIP") Unit are the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who are prosecuting the
case with the assistance of legal technician Lauri Gomez.

        A copy of this press release and key court documents filed in
the case may also be found on the U.S. Attorney's Office's website at
www.usdoj.gov/usao/can .

        All press inquiries to the U.S. Attorney's Office should be
directed to Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew J. Jacobs at (415)436-7181
or Assistant U.S. Attorney Ross Nadel, Chief of the CHIP Unit, in San
Jose at (408

During the three weeks I spent in jail I learned that many people were protesting against my arrest. I also learned that Adobe withdrew its support of my arrest after meeting with EFF. But I was not able to see that or to read letters and articles about my case.

After being released from jail on August 6, I was really surprised and impressed by the scale of the action and the number of people involved in the protests. I'm not an IT superman. I'm just a programmer, like many others. It was unexpected by me that so many people would support a guy from another country that nobody heard about before.

Your support means a lot to me and my family and makes a difference for all.

This experience is going to change me in a profound way that I cannot even appreciate fully as yet. Thank you very much.

Dmitry Sklyarov

The Motion Picture Industry has initiated a number of cases related to the DMCA in their pursuit to snuff out Fair Use of the movies which they develope. It's bad enough that the industry is a haven of invester abuses and expoits actors and writers to the degree that they do, but now they want to steel your DVD's from your home as well!!! For example, a Norwiegian Boy created a DVD player for his Linux computer to play his DVD. The MPAA had him arrested for this Fair Use of his disk. Is it a crime to play your disks? His Hack is Here See this article by the NY Times on the ensuing court case. Copyright by the NY Times By CARL S. KAPLAN Norwegian Teenager Appears at Hacker Trial He Sparked The person who kicked off a huge legal battle involving Hollywood and the Internet is a skinny, 16-year-old Norwegian computer programmer who, with his serious face, wire-rimmed glasses and almost-there mustache, could maybe pass for 17. Yesterday the mild-looking young man, Jon Johansen, was the focus of attention in Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's courtroom in federal court in Manhattan. He calmly admitted, for the first time in a legal tribunal, that he and two other hackers wrote the computer program known as DeCSS . The software, available on the Internet, unlocks the information on an encrypted DVD movie disk, allowing a user to copy the movie to a hard drive for later viewing. DeCSS has Hollywood in a tizzy. In a lawsuit pending before Judge Kaplan, eight major studios are suing Eric Corley, a Long Island-based publisher and editor of a hacker magazine and Web site, for posting the software and linking to hundreds of other sites around the world that offer the code. The studios claim that Corley's "trafficking" in the code violates a federal law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the distribution of a device that is primarily designed to circumvent a technological barrier guarding a copyrighted work. In the first three days of the trial, which began on Monday, a parade of witnesses for the Hollywood studios have testified that movies on DVD disks are protected with an encryption system called CSS to deter piracy. With the aid of DeCSS, witnesses said, a consumer can make an unauthorized copy of a DVD movie, then compress the decrypted file and send it merrily around the Internet to friends or swap it for other pirated movies. Corley, who is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Martin Garbus, a veteran New York trial lawyer and First Amendment specialist, have claimed in legal papers that the new federal law must be interpreted to allow for unauthorized but legitimate access to copyrighted work, lest it imperil First Amendment freedoms. They also say that Corley has never used DeCSS to pirate a movie, and that it would be impractical for anyone to use the code for that purpose. Johansen, about 6 feet tall, with dark, short-cropped hair, was called as a surprise witness for the defense. He was in New York City to attend a hacker convention, and he and his father attended the trial earlier this week as anonymous members of the audience. When a witness pointed him out as one of the authors of DeCSS, Judge Kaplan ordered the young man out of the courtroom, telling him that he was a potential witness. Johansen lives with his parents and two sisters in Larvik, a small town south of Oslo. His father, Per, is a postal worker who runs a computer business on the side. In an interview the day before his testimony, Jon said that he is a self-taught computer expert who started playing with his father's computers when he was six years old. In the fall of 1999, Johansen said, he and two other programmers -- one from Germany and the other from the Netherlands -- decided to write the DeCSS code. He said they wanted to allow people to watch DVD films they had purchased or rented on computers with alternative operating systems like Linux. At that time, he said, there was no hardware or software that could enable someone who purchased a DVD to view it on a Linux-based computer. At trial, Johansen said that his German friend, known by the nickname "Ham," was the one who successfully hacked a DVD player and retrieved the secret CSS "key." Later, Johansen took that information and created a program that is easily usable on Linux machines, he said. His code was released as a Windows application for technical reasons, he added. In November 1999, Johansen posted DeCSS on a Web site operated by his family. He also advertised the program in a hacker chat room and on a bulletin board. He did it "to allow others to use it," he said in the interview. In the next few months, about 20,000 to 30,000 people downloaded copies of the program, he said. After the movie studios sued Corley, Johansen took down the code. In late January of this year, at the behest of the movie studios, police from Norway's financial crime unit visited Johansen at home, bearing a search warrant. They seized his two computers, some CDs, his cell phone and his cell phone charger. "What they hoped to get from the charger, I don't know," he added, smiling. Johansen and his father are now under investigation in Norway for two crimes: an intellectual property offense -- for posting and advertising DeCSS -- and breaking into a computer system without permission. They face a maximum punishment of fines and two years in jail. A minor celebrity in Norway as a result of his DeCSS activities, Johansen said that since the beginning of the year he has received his country's most prestigious academic prize for high school students, as well as several job offers from computer firms. He recently left school and started work as a programmer at an Oslo-based startup working on mobile phone technology and interactive television. While Johansen's testimony seemed to help the defense's efforts to depict the trial as a contest between Goliath and some Davids, its legal significance is questionable. Charles Sims, a lawyer for the movie studios, suggested in an interview that Johansen's testimony is a diversion from the core issues in the case. "The question is what this defendant [Corley] did," Sims said. "Did this defendant traffic in a circumvention device? Whatever was in Jon Johansen's head when he invented DeCSS in Norway in the fall of 1999 is totally irrelevant." At trial, Sims objected to much of Johansen's testimony, saying it was not relevant, but Judge Kaplan wearily waved him off. "The man is here from Norway. I may as well hear it," the judge said. After his son left the witness chair, Per Johansen told a reporter in the courtroom hallway that his son had done "very well." He noted that Jon's grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II. He said that he himself fought communism in Europe in the 1980s by working as a secret courier for Solidarity leaders in Poland, carrying money into the country and smuggling out documents. "Jon is in an historical line," Per Johansen said proudly. "He is fighting for freedom." The trial is expected to end next week. CYBER LAW JOURNAL is published weekly, on Fridays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.