Katalov is president of ElcomSoft, which he founded 12 years ago, inspired by the promise of Russia’s dawning era of capitalism. By the late ’90s the company was doing well, specializing in tools that helped owners of programs like Microsoft Office circumvent password protections to recover files. The products were popular with law-enforcement agencies, and in one case an ElcomSoft employee won a citation as an “honorary deputy sheriff” for helping solve a crime in Ft. Bend, Texas.
What made the company go from crimestopper to alleged criminal was its Advanced eBook Processor, a program that breaks the copy protection in Adobe eBooks. Katalov says it was like other ElcomSoft products in that it allowed legal eBook owners to recover lost passwords, make backups and copy their books to their Palm handhelds. But the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act takes a dim view of those who mess with copyright-protection schemes. Civil-liberties groups charge that the DMCA is so obsessed with putting locks on copyrighted material that it denies the public its constitutional right to make fair use of legally purchased materials, and that its provisions against breaking copy protection–or publishing information about how to perform such technical misdeeds–violates academic freedom and the First Amendment.
Others have run afoul of the law. There was the Princeton professor who published information about his research on the encryption protecting DVDs (the Recording Industry Association of America threatened to sue him). And then there was the publisher of a hacker-style magazine, 2600, which published a link to a program called DeCSS, written by Europeans to allow Linux users to play DVDs on their computers. He was sued by movie studios, and the judgment against him was affirmed by the Court of Appeals.
The ElcomSoft case ups the ante. The company began selling the eBook Processor over the Internet in June 2001, but quickly removed it after Adobe complained. None-theless, in July, the Feds arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, the ElcomSoft employee who designed the program (he was in Las Vegas to give a talk). Under the DMCA, selling a tool that breaks copy protection warrants jail time, and Sklyarov, a frail-looking techno-waif with a wife and babies at home, became an instant cybermartyr. The Feds wisely took him off the hook–in exchange for his testimony in their continuing criminal case against ElcomSoft itself.
The company’s lawyer is Joseph Burton, a former federal prosecutor. Last week he argued a motion with a fascinating, though somewhat Hail Mary-ish, contention: the Internet should be considered an extraterritorial zone, like outer space. “The Internet belongs to no country alone, but to all countries collectively,” he wrote in his motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.
The main event comes on April 1, when the judge hears Burton’s motions to dismiss on constitutional grounds. Though his argument gets technical, attacking what he calls “vagueness” in the DMCA, the bottom line is this: how can it be a crime to allow people legal access to what they legally paid for? (Let alone an offense to publish a description of how they did it–or make an Internet link to such a description.) The copyright owners who helped push the law through, of course, say that these products allow people to make and distribute illegal copies. But should a tool be banned for its worst possible use? Interestingly, none of the people who’ve had the law invoked against them–the professor, the magazine publisher and now the businessman–has been associated with a single instance of a copyrighted work’s being illegally duplicated. If the law is meant to stop pirates, why not go after pirates?
Since the Feds released Sklyarov–eliminating the prospect of someone’s going to jail for writing a program that helps make backup copies–the case has generated fewer headlines. But Katalov, who has lost money and spent too much time away from his wife and 6-year-old daughter, says he is gratified that at least some Americans still care. “I worried that nobody would worry about some Russian guys,” he says. “Now people fight on our side. They know that if we lose, they all lose, too.” If they don’t know, they should.
