Publish and Perish

[David P. Schwartz]

Kevin Brown wrote:

> He wrote a program that decrypts about 25% of a file encrypted for use with the
> Adobe Ebook software as a proof of concept to show how weak the protection was.
> That is a violation of the DMCA (Digital Millenium (not Music) Copyright Act).
> The program is available to US citizens and he came to this country, so he is
> affected by US laws.  Hopefully cases like this and the one with East Coast
> professors about the SDMI will get the part of the law regarding reverse
> engineering being illegal reversed and make it legal and protected again.
>

We've got a lot of foreign nationals working in the US who hail from countries where reverse engineering is next to godliness.  Seems that IBM
pissed off lots of companies and governments last decade holding them hostage to their proprietary interfaces, and when said companies decided
to throw them and their dogs out, they set about reverse engineering things in order to gain access to records that IBM claimed they couldn't
have (the hardware and software were all leased, and IBM claimed they owned the contents, as if they owned a bunch of storage lockers that the
renters had defaulted on).  So the countries passed laws that require companies to either provide "back door" access to private files or else
they'd be subject to reverse engineering.  (Something along those lines, anyway.)

My point here is that it looks like this fellow did the work off-shore (in his own country), for purposes stemming from exactly the same
corporate arrogance that got the Europeans so polarized in the first place.

You've gotta wonder ... if Adobe's software, as sold in certain European countries, is illegal according to local laws and customs, than what
the heck are they (Adobe) complaining about?  The real question is, why are they knowingly trafficing in illegal products to begin with?  I
guess that if any employees of Adobe do any travelling in Europe, they'll have to be very careful not to be arrested and tried for something
similar to drug trafficing!

-David