Word: copyright
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...arrest has sparked a firestorm of controversy over the as-yet-untested Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--and over how far law enforcement should go to protect intellectual property like e-books. The case has provoked the first big showdown between two camps: the programmers who want to bypass security restrictions and the publishers who want to protect the words they sell...
...even Bingham admits the DMCA may have "trampled on" a very important part of copyright law: fair use. You have the right to lend or copy parts of any paper-and-glue book you own, but you can't do the same with an e-book without the express permission of the publisher. This is one reason, e-book veterans say, that the industry has been slow to take off. Reading on a screen is a hassle anyway; why put up with all the extra legal barriers...
...some activists want the law changed--not because they don't believe in copyright protection, but because too much of it is bad for business. "This is not the make-everything-free crowd pushing this," says Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the earliest e-book publishers. "I made every dime I ever had from selling copyrighted material. The question is, Which do you make illegal: breaking and entering, or the locksmith's tool...
...government against Sklyarov is confusing enough: it is for "trafficking" software prohibited by the DMCA. This does not mean he went around selling it himself, but rather that Adobe was able to buy it through a third party--and his name was listed on that software's copyright page. Yes, that is as tenuous as it sounds. "I hope the government knows something we don't," says former U.S. Attorney John Gibbons, "because it looks like they haven't done their homework...
...talking about Fort Knox here. Some of these codes could be cracked by a computer-savvy seven-year-old. That's okay, though, because Big Publishing has the might of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act behind it. This beauty of a pro-business statute - which also comforts the comfortable in the music and movie industries - makes it not only an offense to circumvent any security surrounding copyrighted material, but even to invent any tools that circumvent such security. This is a little like prosecuting Xerox for coming up with the photocopier. Your Honor, someone might use that thing to copy...