Posted on: Saturday, August 25, 2001

Editorial
Free speech remains in the information age

The brave new world of the global information age leads us down interesting — and sometimes troubling — new paths.

One such path involves a Russian computer programmer named Dmitry Sklyarov. Sklyarov, a Moscow graduate student and employee of a Russian computer firm, has developed a program that can disable the copy protections on the Adobe eBook Reader. For his troubles, while he was speaking to a convention of hackers in Las Vegas recently, Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI.

It turns out that while his work is legal in Russia , it is illegal in the United States under something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This was a law conceived by Congress as a way of stopping the electronic theft of intellectual property. In theory, that's a worthy goal. But the Sklyarov case illustrates how a good idea can go badly awry.

For starters, software such as the program he developed can be used to steal intellectual property, but it can also be used legally, to pick up small portions of a book or musical performance under the "fair use" exception.

Then too, Sklyarov was not in the United States stealing material from Adobe. He was simply attending a conference on the vulnerabilities of the Adobe system.

Adobe has recognized this case appears unjust and certainly gives its name — and the American legal system — a black eye in the international information community. The matter will likely be dropped.

But left behind is a bad law in serious need of rewriting. While protection of intellectual property rights is important, so too are the interests of open intellectual exchange and free speech.