[free-sklyarov] Disturbing analogies

huaiyu_zhu at yahoo.com huaiyu_zhu at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 31 14:10:27 PDT 2001


There was a discussion on CNet Radio over lunch time today.  I heard a
section of it, and it makes me uneasy.

One guy was insisting on an analogy of someone producing a shoplifting tool
which has no other usage, and selling it with ads like "use this tool to
steal".

Then it was pointed out to him by the host and another guest that what
Sklyarov did was not for stealing things you do not own, but for doing
things to copies you already bought, that it does have other useful purposes
like letting blind people hear the book, that he did not sell it in US, but
merely gave a presentation on flaws of Adobe systems, that only his employer
sold it, which is not illegal in Russia, and took it out when Adobe
complained.

I thought, great, this is all clear.  But that guy still claims, "yeah well,
I can hear arguments from both sides, it's not clear", or that sort of
thing.  Then the host said something like, "In any case, it's not illegal in
Russia, and US laws should stop at US border".

Hearing this, that guy started telling a story about two "Russian hackers"
stealing company secrets and asking for ransom.  And they did this to US
company from Russia.  And the FBI set up a fake company and invited them to
come here to tell about their "techniques", and nailed them.  Et cetra.

We all know that is a completely unrelated story (if there was such a
story at all).  But to a casual listener, what might stick in their mind
may just be phrases like Russian hackers ... hack in Russia ... steal US
secrets ... Russian hacker invited to US to talk about hacking ... FBI
trapped them ...  US law protect US interest, blah, blah, blah.  If this
was the first time I heard this story, I might be completely confused
about "what this Russian hacker did".

This may even happen when the host and one guest is very clueful on the
issue.

It has been said here that we should avoid using analogies in explaining
this case, as analogies always tend to mislead one way or another.  However,
analogies have been flying around in the media on this case.  Our opponents
are not hesitent to use very misleading analogies.  It takes greater mental
capacity to analyse an analogy and reveal its misleading intonation.  Such
capacities might not be available in general discussions.

So my point is, if we do not come up with short accurate analogies of our
own that can capture listener's imagination, we might lose in a "war of
attention span".  And without attention from ordinary people, good arguments
have very limited use (unless we'd like to see this go through the courts,
of course).

When the other side is trying hard to muddy the water, what is the most
effective way to make it clear again?

Huaiyu Zhu





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