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

[Julian T. J. Midgley]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Richard Kay wrote:

> Here is a copy of a message sent to a digital preservation
> group. We need to get information professionals on our side.

Splendid stuff!

> Please copy/post anywhere you consider appropriate.

A minor, but important point - when doing so, please amend it to include
references to the UK Freesklyarov site (http://uk.freesklyarov.org/), to
ensure that people are easily able to find the details of the London
protest.

Julian


> 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 -----
>
>
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>

-- 
Julian T. J. Midgley                    http://www.xenoclast.org
Cambridge, England.                       PGP Key ID: 0xBCC7863F