California Trial Nears for Landmark Copyright Case. [Registration required.] SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Jury selection in the first criminal prosecution for alleged violations of U.S. digital copyright law will start on Monday in a Silicon Valley court, an attorney in the case said on Friday.
The closely watched case pits Russian software vendor ElcomSoft against federal prosecutors, who charge the Moscow-based firm violated the four-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act with a software program allowing users to manipulate material in Adobe Systems Inc.'s (ADBE.O) eBook format by getting around copyright safeguards.
By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]
Here's a question. You go out online and buy an e-book from, say, Amazon.com. You install Adobe's eBook reader to allow you to read the e-book, but you quickly learn that the eBook reader prevents you from running a text-to-speech program on the e-book. So, although you can read the book, your vision-impaired spouse cannot.
"Ah," you say. "I'll write a program that converts this e-book from the proprietary eBook standard into a PDF file! I have a PDF reader that will let us run text-to-speech."
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you've broken the law by circumventing the restrictions Adobe put in place to protect copyright owners.
ElcomSoft, the company on trial, is charged with illegally creating and distributing such a product. It's important to know that ElcomSoft's product works only on e-books that a user has legally purchased for his or her own use. If you've downloaded a pirated copy, you can't use the ElcomSoft product.
One of the issues at stake here is, when you purchase an e-book, do you have the right to use that e-book as you see fit? Can you transfer it to another computer? Can you copy portions of it under fair-use guidelines? Can you "loan" the e-book to another user as you would, say, a physical book?
The DMCA was written to allow publishers to restrict what you, a consumer, can do with digital media files. Is this legal? Is it ethical?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent FAQ available concerning the ElcomSoft case, including a list of activities that Adobe's software prohibits users from doing with e-books they've purchased.