[Free-sklyarov-uk] [rich at copsewood.net: London protest about anti-preservation DMCA law]

[Richard Kay]

Here is a copy of a message sent to a digital preservation
group. We need to get information professionals on our side.
Please copy/post anywhere you consider appropriate.

I will try and memorise some lines for the play on the way
down to London tomorrow focussing on P if thats OK. Anyone have a
kiddies/joke police helmet ?

Also is anyone driving down from the North, likely to pass
Coventry on the way to London, who is able to give me a lift ?

Richard Kay

----- Forwarded message from Richard Kay <rich at copsewood.net> -----

Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 13:26:22 -0400
From: Richard Kay <rich at copsewood.net>
To: preservation at jisc.ac.uk
Subject: London protest about anti-preservation DMCA law

To all those concerned with digital preservation.

I know this is very short notice, but those who are concerned about
future knowledge of the past are likely to be interested in
a demonstration occuring tomorrow (3rd August) against a US law 
which has anti-preservation effects, known as the DMCA (Digital 
Millenium Copyright Act), outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor 
Square, near Hyde Park, London starting at 1PM.

Protests are taking place in many places worldwide against the wrongful 
imprisonment of Dmitry Sklyarov in the US who has been charged 
with an offence under the DMCA.

The DMCA makes it a criminal offence in the US to publish 
details of the scrambling or encryption methods used to lock 
digital content to the hardware used to read it.
Try and imagine what the future would hold for libraries, if 
in order to be able to read a book you had to maintain the 
instance of a digital reading device in working order for 
which your copy of the book was exclusively encoded. The
DMCA allows exemptions for decoding for digital preservation
purposes, but in practice this decoding is less likely to be 
economically viable unless it can be provided for all fair 
uses of the digital content protected, e.g. for allowing for 
interfaces to braille readers and users to keep their own 
backups. More to the point, such decoding is much less likely 
to be possible for digital content preservation unless the 
information needed to do this decoding can legitimately be 
made more generally available.

The Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who was arrested a fortnight 
ago in the US ago had been invited to speak at a computing
security conference in Las Vegas. He is currently in prison
awaiting trial on a charge relating to his Russian employer
(Elcomsoft) having developed and sold software which can be used to 
interface the Adobe Ebook product to braille readers and to 
allow purchasers of Ebook content to take backup copies. 
Software sold in Russia must by law enable users to be able 
to take backups so - to the extent Dmitry was involved in writing
this software - this was completely legal where this software 
was written. 

The DMCA attempts to override a long tradition of fair use
of copyrighted materials, for example allowing people to
sell second-hand copies of books, borrow books from libraries
and allowing teachers to photocopy small parts of books for 
distribution to students. I think you will also find the DMCA
threatens our ability to archive in future the knowledge of 
the past for the reasons stated above.

Even if you are unable to inform others within the UK library community of
this protest in time for tomorrow, it would be useful for information
about the DMCA to be disseminated and discussed in order to raise 
awareness of these issues. It would be of very great assistance to
those within the software-engineering community who are attempting to
defend the rights to freedom of expression and liberty of our colleagues
if you could use the networks available to information professionals 
to help us in this activity.

You will find more information under the references:
http://freesklyarov.org/ and http://anti-dmca.org/ .

Many thanks for your consideration,

Yours sincerely,

Richard Kay
Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering,
Technology Innovation Centre,
University of Central England,
Perry Barr,
Birmingham B42 2SU
rich.kay at uce.ac.uk
also rich at copsewood.net


----- End forwarded message -----