Word: e-book
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...suitcase he was carrying. Not bombs or secret government documents, but software to make other kinds of documents--electronic books--less than secret. Working for Moscow-based ElcomSoft while finishing his Ph.D., Sklyarov had used his head and hands to write code that cracks the security on an e-book reader sold by software giant Adobe. What Sklyarov did is perfectly legal in the rest of the world, and it was legal here until last year. "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Sklyarov told TIME in his first interview since being released on bail...
...publishers are terrified of any software that makes e-books as free and easy to copy as digital music was with Napster. And there is some justification for this. Consider companies like FileOpen Systems, a tiny New York firm that sells extra e-book security for scientific journals and financial newsletters--small publishers that really need paying customers. Last year ElcomSoft produced a piece of software that cracked FileOpen's code--potentially driving it out of business. CEO Sanford Bingham spent hours on the phone to Moscow in vain. "If they were doing this with credit cards, nobody would have...
...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...
...returns to jail, e-book publishers will have free rein to use Adobe's security restrictions on what little e-book market there is. If he returns to Moscow, Silicon Valley will breathe easy and more of us may end up reading e-books on our computers. Whether we will have paid for them is another question entirely...
...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...