[free-sklyarov] Plea Bargin for Dima?!?

[Bob Smart]

On Wednesday 22 August 2001 16:27, you wrote:
> According to News.com, Both the prosecutors & defense
> requested an extra week to discuss a possible plea
> bargin for Dimitry...

I've been expecting that for a while.  It would make a lot of sense for the 
Forces of Evil to do this, too: if Dmitry pleads guilty, it establishes (if 
not necessarily legally, at least politically) that his arrest was proper and 
what he did was a crime, which was probably the main point of this whole 
fiasco from the beginning.  Holding him any longer does not further advance 
the agenda of legitimizing the criminal part of DMCA, and the longer this 
goes on, the more public attention is drawn to what I belive was intended to 
be an obscure little battleground that nobody would notice until it was too 
late.

Once the basic premise of DMCA is supported in this way, the next obvious 
step is to go arrest somebody else, but broaden the scope of the "crime" even 
further next time.  Meanwhile, we've been deprived of our Poster Child, so 
mostly they're probably hoping that all this public attention will die down 
so they can continue quietly subverting the Constitution in relative 
obscurity.

The one thing that went somewhat haywire with the whole scheme was that 
nobody anticpated that there would be actual marching in the streets over one 
foreign hacker being held on an eye-glazingly technical charge, particularly 
in connection with a product (e-books) that nobody knows or cares about.  
However, if Dmitry pleads out at this point, then the important point has 
been made and the overall pro-DRM mission can still be considered a success.

So I want him to go home, however he can and whatever he has to do, because 
he should be with his family...but if that's how it plays out, I'd say that's 
a pretty stunning blow to DRM dissidents and it will make any further 
progress MUCH more difficult for us.

So, as others have been asking recently: NOW what do we do?

-- 

What I wrote above is hereby dedicated to the public domain and may be freely 
used, in whole or in part, with or without attribution.