[free-sklyarov] Generic reply to the "Dmitry is a criminal" comments

[Seth David Schoen]

Xcott Craver writes:

> 	Actually, the primary weakness of most of the "Dmitry is a criminal"
> 	arguments is vagueness.  Those arguments refer to "stealing," and
> 	analogies to robbing houses.  Isn't it wrong to steal?  So if I
> 	put a lock on my house ETC ETC ETC.
> 
> 	I think the best way to answer this is to ask, point-blank:
> 	Who stole what?  Name one single specific example of anyone
> 	stealing anything using this program.
> 
> 	These folks easily launch into rants about hypothetical thieves
> 	who are robbing their houses or committing piracy.  Point out
> 	that people should only go to jail for committing actual crimes,
> 	not because of hypothetical crimes committed by invisible pink
> 	hacker gnomes that only they can see.

Fair enough, but Dmitry Sklyarov standards charged with "aiding and
abetting" (not copyright infringement but circumvention) -- those 
"Dmitry is a criminal" folks who talked to Adobe before yesterday
probably heard something like "Dmitry _helped copyright pirates_
steal".

Since concerned members of the public aren't FBI investigators, and
don't (as all movie fans should know by now) "investigate allegations
of criminal copyright infringement", they may not be familiar with
particular cases of infringement.  But they know that it does happen
from time to time.

In that sense, many of these people will reply "It's not that Dmitry
stole anything, but that he helped the community of pirates who want
to steal our movies in seven min -- oops, wrong case..."  But
seriously, they will say that Dmitry deliberately helped make
infringement easier.

The question about identifying particular acts of infringement is a
good one and an important one, but given that the Southern District of
New York wasn't convinced by them, the anti-Dmitry public is not
guaranteed to be sympathetic either.  "This case is not about
copyright infringement" could have been heard from either the
plaintiffs or defendants in _Universal v. Reimerdes_ (from the
defendants, asking where the harm was, or suggesting that there was no
case; from the plaintiffs, arguing that there was no "noninfringing
use" defense).

The most common answer I'd expect to "who stole what?" is "I don't
know who stole what with AEBPR, but the global pirate community stole
a whole lot of things, and Dmitry added useful software to their
arsenal of evil hacker tools".

The "crowbars are legal" argument works well if people think of AEBPR
like a VCR (hmmm, why do you suppose StreamBox called StreamBox VCR
"Streambox VCR"?) or a photocopy machine or a CD-RW drive, which they
believe has a substantial noninfringing use.  It doesn't work well if
people think of AEBPR like a bong, which they personally have never
used in a legal way.  The most damning factor in the "crowbars are
legal" line is the "wink wink nudge nudge factor" (maybe it should be
called the "Leonard Cohen factor") where someone suggests that
everybody knows that the "real" use of some random thing is illegal.

(Crowbars are kind of borderline as far as the wink wink nudge nudge
factor goes, because people who actually do manual labor all the time,
unlike many of us here, know about important noninfringing uses that
are part of their experience.  For many of us, the only obvious crowbar
uses _we've experienced_ -- including "seen in a movie" -- are illegal.)

Because of the wink wink nudge nudge factor, I suggest that it is
still important to provide some strong examples of legal uses.  I
found that people at the protest were reasonable interested in these
and might not have considered them before.  "Oh", they may say, "I
thought it was just a hacker tool" [cringe] "I didn't know that blind
people were using it..."

This also has the advantage of being quicker than teaching someone
all about copyright law.  Somebody who has never heard of 17 USC 121
can still understand that blind people ought to be allowed to read
books.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Its really terrible when FBI arrested
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | hacker, who visited USA with peacefull
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF) | mission -- to share his knowledge with
     http://www.freesklyarov.org/      | american nation.  (Ilya V. Vasilyev)