[free-sklyarov] International law and U.S. v. Sklyarov

Joe Barr warthawg at ecpi.com
Mon Jul 23 14:37:43 PDT 2001


Perhaps his presentation at Defcon was sufficient for the conditions of "otherwise traffic"?

That would put the commission of the crime in the US, not Russia.

See ya,
Joe Barr



On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 14:51:47 -0400
Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com> wrote:

> Chris is an unusually smart fellow, and I have no quibble with what he 
> says. But in thinking through this myself, it seems like these are 
> reasonable questions:
> 
>          1. Is it reasonable for one country's law to apply to those people 
> who committed "crimes" while outside that country? Personally, I'm inclined 
> to say no, but I recognize that the weight of legal opinion is likely 
> against me.
> 
>          2. Does writing the code for Elcomsoft's product violate the DMCA? 
> (let's ignore the jurisdictional question for the moment) The problem here 
> is that the DMCA was intentionally written terribly broadly. It says: "No 
> person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or 
> otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, 
> or part thereof, that (circumvents, etc.)" It's true the prosecution has 
> just lodged the trafficking charge, but I can see them amending their 
> charges to include "manufacturing" if necessary.
> 
> This is a real danger, and this is why y'all should be agitating to repeal 
> or amend the DMCA as well as freeing Sklyarov, since for all you know there 
> could be 10 more arrests that are scheduled to take place in the next hour.
> 
> Does anyone have any cites to how broadly "traffic in" has been interpreted 
> by U.S. courts?
> 
> -Declan
> 
> 
> At 02:37 PM 7/20/01 -0400, Chris Savage wrote:
> >I think the problem here is linking the person arrested with the intra-US 
> >conduct.
> >
> >Let's assume that a programmer writes works for hire for the company for 
> >whom he works.
> >
> >Let's assume that the works are legal in the country where the programmer 
> >works.
> >
> >Let's assume that the company causes those works to be available in 
> >Country X, where for some reason they are illegal.
> >
> >The programmer has done nothing illegal that I can see.  The company has 
> >acted legally in the place where it resides, but acted illegally in a 
> >country to which its products got exported.
> >
> >I'm not an expert on international law, but I don't see the liability of 
> >the programmer here.
> >
> >Chris S.
> 
> 
> 
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> 


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