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

[Declan McCullagh]

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.