Throwing The E-Book At Him

Unlike most tourists in the mid-July Nevada heat, Dmitri Sklyarov did not come to Las Vegas for the casinos. He hates the noise, and besides, as a computer scientist he knows how low the odds are of winning. "I use my head and my hands to make money, not waiting for luck," Sklyarov explains in broken English. So there were really only two highlights of his visit: the part where he spoke at the Def Con computer-security conference, and the part at the end where he got handcuffed and led away by the FBI.

The reason for his arrest, say federal investigators, was in the suitcase he was carrying. Not bombs or secret government documents, but software to make other kinds of documents--electronic books--less than secret. Working for Moscow-based ElcomSoft while finishing his Ph.D., Sklyarov had used his head and hands to write code that cracks the security on an e-book reader sold by software giant Adobe. What Sklyarov did is perfectly legal in the rest of the world, and it was legal here until last year. "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Sklyarov told TIME in his first interview since being released on bail.

His arrest has sparked a firestorm of controversy over the as-yet-untested Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--and over how far law enforcement should go to protect intellectual property like e-books. The case has provoked the first big showdown between two camps: the programmers who want to bypass security restrictions and the publishers who want to protect the words they sell.

As a rule, computer geeks might best be described as laid-back libertarians--they don't like laws encroaching on their territory, but they're usually too busy to care. Sklyarov's arrest changed all that. Since the DMCA makes it a criminal offense merely to make the tools that some hacker might use to crack security on a copyrighted document, hundreds of programmers suddenly feared they might also fall afoul of it. "I've been a programmer for 10 years, and this is the kind of thing you have to do all the time," says Evan Prodromou, one of the organizers of the Free Sklyarov campaign. "Interoperability, reverse engineering--this is our bread and butter."

But publishers are terrified of any software that makes e-books as free and easy to copy as digital music was with Napster. And there is some justification for this. Consider companies like FileOpen Systems, a tiny New York firm that sells extra e-book security for scientific journals and financial newsletters--small publishers that really need paying customers. Last year ElcomSoft produced a piece of software that cracked FileOpen's code--potentially driving it out of business. CEO Sanford Bingham spent hours on the phone to Moscow in vain. "If they were doing this with credit cards, nobody would have any qualms about seeing this guy in jail," he says. "Ultimately there has to be a legal sanction."

But even Bingham admits the DMCA may have "trampled on" a very important part of copyright law: fair use. You have the right to lend or copy parts of any paper-and-glue book you own, but you can't do the same with an e-book without the express permission of the publisher. This is one reason, e-book veterans say, that the industry has been slow to take off. Reading on a screen is a hassle anyway; why put up with all the extra legal barriers?