[free-sklyarov] What did he do IN THE US that was 'wrong'?

Bob Smart bobds at blorch.org
Sat Jul 28 20:46:02 PDT 2001


On Saturday 28 July 2001 19:08, you wrote:

> By getting Adobe to drop its complaint, and getting the US Attorney to
> drop the charges, we can raise the bar on enforcement of the unfair
> and unjust DMCA. If we do this, we move it one step closer to the
> dustbin of legal history.

Here, I must disagree.  If the government can waltz in and bully someone like 
this, then just slither away when the lights come on, then this doesn't 
"raise the bar."  It affirms that they can come wreck your life any time they 
want, and then walk away without any accountability, free to do it again 
whenever they feel like it.  If they let Dmitry go TODAY, their real mission 
has already been accomplished: they've made an example of him, they've 
demonstrated that they CAN exercise this kind of power at will, and I have no 
doubt that they've put the fear of God into a lot of people who might 
otherwise have been inclined to exercise their civil rights.

If this whole thing plays through to a conclusive resolution, such as 
outright overturning of the DMCA, THEN there will have been some meaningful 
limits established.  Otherwise, the other shoe is still ready to drop any 
time and on anybody.  If they release him voluntarily, the lasting point that 
will have been established is that this is within their discretion--that they 
GET to choose whether to keep him and others like him locked up and for how 
long.

Furthermore, I see a trend of escalation, here: recent previous attacks on 
fair use and free speech have mostly taken the form of civil suits--but now, 
the bar has indeed been raised, by making this a criminal matter.  If they 
don't get slapped down hard and definitively about this, then I think it's 
only prudent to anticipate that there will be further escalation, in terms of 
the penalties sought, in terms of the expansion of what constitutes an 
offense, or both.  Why would DOJ ease up, when so far they've been successful?

Laws that stay on the books "but nobody actually enforces them any more, do 
they?" are first-rate tools for oppression by selective enforcement--for 
example, "sodomy" laws that technically criminalize activities that 
heterosexuals engage in all the time, but somehow by sheer coincidence, the 
only people who ever get prosecuted happen to be gay.

-- 

What I wrote above is hereby dedicated to the public domain and may be freely 
used, in whole or in part, with or without attribution.




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