[free-sklyarov] Pictures of FreeSklyarov protest in Russian press.

Ilya V. Vasilyev _ath_ at mail.ru
Tue Dec 3 04:57:28 PST 2002


Hi, All!

In the latest weekly (December, N49(448)) magazine "TV-Park" (circ.320,400)
I have found two photoes from FreeSklyarov actions:

1.  Los-Vegas (DEF CON?) protest with five good signs (FREE DMITRY
SKLYAROV with Dmitry photo, DROP THE CHARGE, nice woman with
"ARE MIRRORS ILLEGAL TOO?",..)

2. Moscow protest!  Three of us, with CD-ROMS and good  cyrillic slogan
"Mind Freedom = Code Freedom;"

There are also photoes from Johnny-Mnemonic, The Net, SwordFish and so on..

Sorry, have no scanner to publish in the Net. :(

-- -- --
Ilya V. Vasilyev
Civil Hackers' School
Moscow Center, +7(095) 963-3916
http://hscool.ugin.ru/
http://spryg.zork.net/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms at computerbytesman.com>
To: <free-sklyarov at zork.net>
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 7:00 PM
Subject: [free-sklyarov] Straining digital copyright law, junior paper
exposes protection flaws in CDs


> http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/11/21/news/6433.shtml
>
> Straining digital copyright law, junior paper exposes protection flaws
> in CDs
>
> By JOSHUA TAUBERER
> Princetonian Senior Writer
>
>
> Photo by Gabriel Fossati
>     As senior computer science major Alex Halderman '03 was presenting
> his junior paper to a room of scientists Monday, he was thinking about
> his future career. Being sued by the music industry was further from his
> mind.
>
>     Halderman said he could possibly be sued for violating the Digital
> Millennium Copyright Act by presenting his spring JP at the ACM
> Conference on Computer & Communication Security in Washington.
>
>     Halderman's paper explains how some companies have protected CDs
> from being copied by computers.
>
>     Concern over a DMCA lawsuit until now has been reserved for just
> some of the University's faculty, notably computer science professor
> Edward Felten.
>
>     But what separates Halderman even from the professors - in the
> unlikely event that he is sued - is that the University might provide
> him with legal defense, Halderman said.
>
>     "I've been given assurances that the University would help me if I
> were sued for breaking the DMCA," he said. This would be an
> unprecedented and controversial move for the University if it were to
> happen.
>
>     The DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy-protection technologies,
> such as encryption and digital watermarking. The copy-protection system
> that Halderman examined is an exploit of existing flaws in computer
> software.
>
>     Because those technologies constitute a major focus area in computer
> science, some say the DMCA prohibits legitimate academic research.
>
>     "That makes the DMCA problematic for universities and other
> institutions," Wilson School professor Christopher Eisgruber said in an
> email.
>
>     The DMCA is the same law that put peer-to-peer file sharing programs
> - such as Napster, Gnutell and Kazaa - on the judicial radar.
>
>     Also as a result of the DMCA, the University's radio station WPRB
> will face higher royalties for webcasting.
>
>     Halderman - a 'Prince' associate photo editor - said he would have
> written his JP differently if there were no DMCA.
>
>     In the past, to show the weaknesses in a security system, one would
> write a program to break it. "That would be a proof," he said.
>
>     But since the DMCA was passed in 1998, creating such a proof can be
> illegal.
>
>     Instead, Halderman said he was careful to explain why the CDs'
> copy-protection system is inherently weak, without providing a recipe
> for circumventing it.
>
>     In 2001 Felten received a letter from the music industry allegedly
> threatening a DMCA lawsuit in response to research he and others had
> done.
>
>     The threatening letter never became a lawsuit. But following
> Felten's troubles, the University faculty voted to establish a committee
> on threats to academic freedom by legal intimidation, chair of the
> committee and physics professor Edward Groth said in an email.
>
>     Groth said the committee will be finalizing a report to the dean of
> the faculty's office next month.
>
>     The University has provided indemnification - legal defense - for
> students and faculty in the past, when they were performing a certain
> function for the University, such as serving on the Honor Committee,
> General Counsel Peter McDonough said.
>
>     Indemnification was originally designed only to protect the highest
> officers of the University from suits related to their roles, he said.
>
>     Protecting researchers for the sake of research is more than just
> rare, he added. "It is unheard of."
>
>     McDonough's office recommends cases of indemnification to the
> president, who holds the authority of granting indemnification.
>
>     "Once you get indemnification and once the University controls your
> defense, all of the sudden the decisions . . . are not necessarily the
> individuals," he said.
>
>     McDonough added that he would not want to see his office become the
> de facto clearinghouse for research papers.
>
>     If his office were to deny a researcher recommendation for
> indemnification, McDonough said, then some might see the office as
> censoring the student or faculty member.
>
>     Groth said, "Technology has completely changed the landscape."
>
>     The DMCA was created to prevent technology from making copyrights
> moot. But the law itself is unusual.
>
>     Halderman's JP adviser, Professor Andrew Appel '81, said the DMCA
> gives "a hook on which to hang a reasonably credible threat" - even if
> that threat would be unlikely to hold up in court.
>
>     "One has to explicitly be prepared to deal with the possibility of
> these threats of lawsuits," he said.
>
>     Without a team of defense lawyers at a researcher's disposal, facing
> a threat may not be feasible. Some researchers might be forced to choose
> a less risky path by not doing the research at all.
>
>     Halderman called that the "chilling effect" of the DMCA. Though
> Halderman said it is unlikely that he would be sued, he said he plans to
> continue his research, which could cause more conflict with the act.
>
>
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