[free-sklyarov] Re: Adobe violation of the DMCA?

[clank at ai.mit.edu]

Oscar Wilde writes:
 > For example, a local non-profit association to which I belong has
 > been publishing our *copyrighted* member directory in electronic
 > form as a PDF (created with a purchased copy of Acrobat 4.05). We
 > disallowed text selection to make it harder for people to extract
 > our names and addresses en masse and spam us with unsolicited
 > offers (and also because we *sell* our mailing list). Now we find
 > that anyone with the later version of the software can defeat the
 > digital content protections that we, as publisher, imposed on our
 > copyrighted digital work -- protections that are in principle no
 > different from those on Adobe eBooks.

Very interesting... perhaps enough to run with.  FWIW, Adobe's defense
would probably be that Acrobat 5.0 has an economically significant
purpose other than to circumvent access controls, and is not marketed
for that purpose.  (The 1201 proscriptions are on items which either:

  *) Are designed to circumvent
  *) Have only a limited economically significant purpose other than
     to circumvent
  *) Have no economically significant purpose other than to circumvent

either a 1201(a) access control, or a 1201(b) copy control.  Of
course, "limited economically significant purpose" is in the eye of
the beholder, perhaps a judge who may well be inclined to believe that
the activities of large companies with executives in nice suits are
more ecnomically significant than those of long-haired hacker types,
as was the case in the 2600 DeCSS case).

If you think this is a possible avenue for a defense (that AEBPR has
economically significant purposes other than to circumvent, and was
marketed with those purposes in mind), you may very well be right ---
but that's ultimately up to the lawyers.

rst