Going to jail for crimes in other countries

[beavis]

I think that if you are in anyway involved in the entertainment business, you should be in it because you enjoy and love it, not to make a living, and therefore prepared to not make one. (sentence deleted by moderator2)

[Enough Exams Already]

Originally Posted by glenn

Writing software that breaks encryption schemes <> actively engaging in violating copyright protection (if that's even a crime) <> violating copyright. Far as I can see, reverse engineering in most cases is all well and good.

As I understand it, reverse engineering is fine so long as you don't end up replicating the copyrighted material/process/algorithm/etc. If I wanted to sell a word processing application, I could make it look and act like MS Word, but I can't give it the same guts as Word, even if by coincidence.

Actively engaging in violating copyright protection <> violating copyright?? That doesn't make sense to me. What would the difference be?

The grad student may have just been coming up with decryption algorithms for fun--that I can see. But ElcomSoft was trying to break the copy protection on e-books. I'd find it hard to buy that ElcomSoft was trying to break copy protection for fun. If they're not in the business of developing copy protection for e-books, why were they trying to break it?

[MathGuy]

Wait, I'm confused. This guy writes a software program whose express purpose is to remove copyright protections from Adobe E-books, and then he makes this known/available to others. How is this not wrong?

[Oracle]

Hey, Mathguy, where were you when folks were bragging about using Napster et al to get music without paying for it??


PS - I agree with you.

[Enough Exams Already]

From what glenn and the article say, it's a slightly different situation. It seems that the grad student either developed this decryption algorithm to crack the copy protection, or he created the algorithm for fun and it just happened to work on e-book copy protection; it's not clear which is the case.

I think glenn's question, then, is whether US authorities can arrest him even though he didn't write his code here, didn't decrypt anything here, and committed no other crimes here. (Is that closer to the issue you're posing, glenn? Again, just trying to frame the issue.)

[MountainHawk]

There seems to be a number of people that feel theft of intellectual material is somehow less of a crime than theft of physical property. It's not, and the instant you have used code to bust encrpytion on copyrighted material, you have commited a crime.

[MathGuy]

Originally Posted by Article

Northern District of California Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Frewing may also call to the stand a number of people who bought ElcomSoft's E-Book cracking program, and two investigators employed by Adobe, whose complaint against ElcomSoft started the case.

According to the article, the program is described as an "E-book cracking program". Besides, I think Glenn is being a little disingenuous with us: according to the article, the charges against the guy have been dropped and have been reapplied to the company, ElcomSoft. The Russian will testify in the case.

Originally Posted by Enough Exams Already

From what glenn and the article say, it's a slightly different situation. It seems that the grad student either developed this decryption algorithm to crack the copy protection, or he created the algorithm for fun and it just happened to work on e-book copy protection; it's not clear which is the case.

I think glenn's question, then, is whether US authorities can arrest him even though he didn't write his code here, didn't decrypt anything here, and committed no other crimes here. (Is that closer to the issue you're posing, glenn? Again, just trying to frame the issue.)

That's the general issue people have with what happened.

And in response to previous posts, there IS a difference between:
1) providing directions on how to unencrypt something (is that illegal?)
2) using the directions to unencrypt data (is that illegal?)
3) using the unencrypted information in a fashion that contravenes copyright laws.

Seems like he was 'guilty' of #1. Does that justify being thrown in jail?(ya, I know that his intent was #3. But even if it was, the mere accusation doesn't seem like a jailing offence).

[Cho Da]

Perhaps we should all put links to DeCSS in our signatures?

Originally Posted by MountainHawk

There seems to be a number of people that feel theft of intellectual material is somehow less of a crime than theft of physical property.

Don't try to feed those words into my mouth.

the instant you have used code to bust encrpytion on copyrighted material, you have commited a crime.

Oh really? Crime of what? How is the copyright holder harmed by doing this? The copyright holder isn't harmed until you start making copies and distributing them.