[free-sklyarov] US courts kowtow to entertainment industry (fwd)

[Jei]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23084.html

US courts kowtow to entertainment industry
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 29/11/2001 at 08:24 GMT


Wednesday was a bad day for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a
watchdog group involved in several suits challenging the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of consumers, researchers and
publishers. 

First up, 2600 publisher Eric Corely aka Emmanuel Goldstein, who was
barred from posting or linking to the DeCSS DVD descrambling utility last
summer by a US district court, has lost his appeal. EFF, which represented
Corely, received word Wednesday that the Second US Circuit Court of
Appeals affirmed the district court's ruling, but has not yet received a
copy of the decision. EFF says it will publish it as soon as it can,
probably within a few days' time. 

Second, Princeton Computer Science Professor Edward Felten, who brought
suit with EFF representation seeking a declaratory judgment which would
guarantee his freedom to present and publish findings from the HackSDMI
public challenge of last September, has seen his case dismissed. 

The controversy began last year, when the Recording Industry Association
of America (RIAA) sent him a nastygram hinting that he could be sued under
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for making public his research
showing that the SDMI watermarking technologies were weak. 

Felten later presented his findings at the tenth annual Usenix Security
Conference in Washington, DC this past August, but continued to press for
the declaratory judgment against the RIAA. EFF says they will appeal the
judge's decision to drop the suit. 

Incidentally, EFF is working on behalf of Russian programmer Dmitry
Sklyarov, though not representing him. Sklyarov is facing stiff criminal
charges under the DMCA for his part in developing the Advanced eBook
Processor which cracks the access controls on Adobe's eBook Reader.