FYI -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Julian T. J. Midgley Subject: Press Release - London and Edinburgh Protests 30 August (fwd) Purely for information: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 28, 2001 Press Contact: Julian T. J. Midgley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Phone: +44 7713 166000 "DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST DMITRY SKLYAROV" PROTESTS TO BE HELD IN LONDON AND EDINBURGH ON THURSDAY, 30 AUGUST 2001 Cambridge, England - Peaceful protesters from the Campaign for Digital Rights will gather again outside the US Embassy in London at 1330 on Thursday, 30 August, to demand that the charges against Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov be dropped, and the DMCA (the law under which he is charged) revised or repealed. A simultaneous event will take place in Edinburgh. All are welcome. Details of both protests are available at: http://uk.eurorights.org/calendar/ These protests reflect international outrage at Dmitry's arrest- similar protests will be held on the same day in Russia in Moscow, and in the USA in San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Black Rock City and Reno. (See http://freesklyarov.org/calendar/ for details). Background ---------- Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest on July 16, for a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), has chilled academic research into cryptography on both sides of the Atlantic, and led UK academics and programmers to call for conferences to be held outside the USA so that they can attend them without fear of lawsuits or arrest. Alan Cox, the prominent Linux kernel programmer, has resigned from the committee of USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, since he no longer feels able to attend USENIX events in the USA for fear of prosecution under the DMCA for his work on the Linux kernel. Similar fears prompted Dutch Cryptographer Niels Ferguson to decide not to publish an academic paper describing security weaknesses in a content protection mechanism. In the United States, a Professor Felten was threatened with legal action under the DMCA if he published a paper describing flaws in a digital watermarking scheme. Dmitry himself will be arraigned on the 30th in San Jose, and faces a fine of up to $500,000 and up to five years imprisonment if he is found guilty; this for writing a program that, at the very worst, is nothing more than a digital crowbar, with perfectly legitimate uses. He is not charged with copyright infringement, nor has any copyright infringement been attributed to the users of the program, distributed by Elcomsoft, a Russian software company. Adobe Systems Inc, the company which sells the eBook software at which Dmitry's program was targetted, and which filed the original complaint with the FBI, has since joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation in calling for the charges against Dmitry to be dropped. Nevertheless, the case proceeds, being seen by the recording and publishing industries as an important test case for the new law, and by programmers, academics, librarians and many others worldwide as a dangerous threat to traditional freedoms. With foreign nationals being arrested for reverse engineering software programs, and academics being gagged by threats from publishing companies, the United States of America is no longer "The Land of the Free". Traditionally, those of us in Europe would sit back smugly at this point and laugh quietly at yet another ridiculous piece of American legislation that doesn't affect us. This time, we can afford to do no such thing. Not only does the DMCA itself stretch its tentacles across the Atlantic to silence our academics and still the fingers of our programmers, but, in less than 16 months, the European Copyright Directive (the EUCD) will be enacted in the EU member states, with near identical provisions forbidding the circumvention of "copy protection mechanisms". The Campaign for Digital Rights ------------------------------- The UK Campaign for Digital Rights has formed to ensure that by the time that the EUCD is passed into law, it has been revised to the extent that it no longer threatens academic research or the public's ability to make fair use of electronic books, music and videos. It is important to stress that we respect absolutely the principal of copyright; many of our members are programmers and authors whose works enjoy the traditional protections of copyright - we do not condone copyright infringement in any form. However, we firmly believe that by making the circumvention of copy protection mechanisms a crime, laws such as the DMCA and EUCD threaten legitimate academic research and the work of respectable computer programmers. Furthermore, by effectively prohibiting discussion of the weaknesses of particular copy protection schemes, these laws practically guarantee that copy protection mechanisms will be weak and easily broken, to the detriment of the very authors and musicians whose work they are designed to protect. The Campaign for Digital Rights is working together with industry, academics, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (http://www.fipr.org/), and similar organisations throughout Europe and America. For more information, mailing lists, et al, see: http://uk.eurorights.org/ -- Julian T. J. Midgley http://www.xenoclast.org/ Cambridge, England. PGP Key ID: 0xBCC7863F Beware the European Copyright Directive: http://uk.eurorights.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]