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American Morning

Copyright Violation Case Goes to Court Today

Aired August 30, 2001 - 11:16   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: A Russian computer programmer, charged with copyright violations, is scheduled to be arraigned today in San Jose, California. Dmitry Sklyarov's case has attracted international attention. He was arrested in Las Vegas, you may have heard this story.

He was attending a computer security convention, and he claims that he has done nothing wrong. The U.S. government, however, sees this case very differently. He is the first person charged under a new act that forbids technology designed to evade copyright protections.

Joining us now from San Francisco with more on this case is Sally Richards who writes about the internet for "Wired" magazine. Sally, I'm sure you know this stuff a lot better than we do.

Can you explain to us exactly what's going on? Because, as I've heard it and read it, this guy is claiming that he didn't do anything illegal. And if maybe his company is doing something the U.S. government doesn't like, they should take it up with this company and not with him.

SALLY RICHARDS, WIRED MAGAZINE: Yes, good morning, Leon. There are -- this is a case that has so many different facets to it. The DMCA, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was enacted in 1998 at the height of dot com. Where basically entertainment interests were -- entertainment people put this together to protect the copyright of movies and music.

HARRIS: Music, books, things like that. Yes.

RICHARDS: All of that stuff that was being flipped around on the internet faster than anybody could possibly keep track of it.

So what has happened now is that Dmitry's company, ElcomSoft, who is by some strange fact also a client -- or the U.S. government is a client of theirs currently for some of the software that they develop. But the software that they developed that they're in court for currently is a way to, basically...

HARRIS: To get around encryption services?

RICHARDS: Encryption for Adobe's E-books.

HARRIS: OK.

RICHARDS: So it's -- in 1998 there was a lot of technology that wasn't around currently. Instead of evolving, the DMCA just kind of stayed where it was. There is a thing called "fair use," which when you look at it, it's the -- "fair use" in copyright allows a kid to go to a library and copy a book on the Xerox machine.

HARRIS: Right.

RICHARDS: Years from now, when we look at this case, we'll see that bringing ElcomSoft and Dmitry to court is like bringing a developer out of Xerox who developed the Xerox machine.

The software was developed, so ElcomSoft says, to basically put it into a text to speech -- e-books -- into a text to speech format.

HARRIS: Yes.

RICHARDS: So blind people can actually listen to the text. So it -- it's...

HARRIS: Let me jump in for a quick second. Because, you said something that I think might crystallize it for people who are trying to figure out what's going on here.

Essentially if another country has a law that says you are not allowed to copy books, and a Xerox executive went and visited their country, he would end up getting arrested in that particular case. Is sort of what's happened here, correct? Because what this guy did was something that gets around this copyright issue, correct?

RICHARDS: Well, the funny thing about the DMCA is that the act of putting a copyrighted piece of text into a speech or into a text to speech program is not illegal. What is illegal here, according to the DMCA, is that providing the software to do so is illegal. So, you've got two strange things going on here. It's kind of a push and pull type of thing.

I think what's going to happen is that the government, the U.S. attorney is going to find out that they brought a knife to a gunfight in this case. And I really don't think this was the case they should have used as test case on this.

HARRIS: I've heard a lot of people say that same exact thing. But thanks for coming and explaining it for us. We're going to try to keep track of this story and see how this plays out. Because, a lot of us have a lot of interest in where this ends up.

RICHARDS: Absolutely.

HARRIS: Sally Richards, thank you very much. Take care.

RICHARDS: Thank you, bye-bye.

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