A New Kind Of Prisoner
by Sean Carolan

For a great while in the Eighties, rock was all about causes. A jaded soul within me tends to think it was because one could bootstrap a flagging career by having a prime appearance on one of the benefit records that came out at the time. I'd also like to think that, for many, the urge to participate in a Band Aid, or Live Aid, or a USA For Africa, was a genuine act of altruism. Whatever.

The wave began to recede, it seemed to me, when the causes became a bit more difficult to explain. The music industry in general went gung-ho for starving children; who doesn't want to save a starving child? But when it came to people who spoke out against their governments, the throng of supportive artists winnowed rapidly down to a fairly recognizable few. The idea of having concerts to increase awareness of political prisoners - "prisoners of conscience", as they were often identified by Amnesty International - was a good one on paper, but as I watched those concerts and their desperate attempts to convince the average viewer that there was a clear and immediate need for the release of these prisoners, I realized the size of the uphill battle they faced.

The problem is that if you have to explain the problem, you're sunk. The general public, sadly, hasn't got the patience for a call to action that requires an explanation.

So with that in mind, I'm going to try to explain a new problem to you anyway...

Political prisoners, of the sort that Amnesty International aids, are in their respective binds because they dared to assert their rights to a government that has no interest in defending them.

Politics has little to do with the following, however...

A man has been jailed, and is being held without bail, for daring to assert a right that most of us take for granted.

This is not happening in Eastern Europe, or Afghanistan, or Myanmar.

This is happening in Las Vegas. And the man it's happening to, Dmitry Sklyarov, is a prisoner of knowledge - a corporate prisoner.

He knows how to copy an e-book. He knows this because his company makes software that does this, in a country where this is not only legal, but required. But this has run afoul of the desires of one of the companies that makes e-book software: Adobe Systems, Inc. He gave a speech in Las Vegas, they complained about the things he said in his speech, and he's in jail, held without bail. It's been three weeks, and they're holding another hearing today.

Adobe has since withdrawn their complaint; they are, after all, a corporation, as beholden to PR as any other. Dmitry, however, is still in jail, because the Justice Department wants him there, for he broke a law that shouldn't exist.

The law works as follows: You, a consumer, are entitled to buy a book. You are entitled to copy it for your own personal use, and you're entitled to sell the original. You aren't allowed to sell copies. In legal parlance, this is all called Fair Use. But according to the law Dmitry broke, called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you cannot copy a work if it has any form of copy protection, even though it's your right to do so.

The DMCA is so broad a law that I'm about to come close to breaking it. One of the copy protection methods mentioned in the complaint against Sklyarov is ROT-13. Sounds inscrutable, but here's how that method works:

Take any written word, and replace each letter within it with a letter that is halfway across the alphabet (thirteen positions) from it; so "a" becomes "n", "b" becomes "o", "c" becomes "p", etc. This is a really weak encryption method, because it's easily broken - just shift everything another thirteen characters. One word you can use to describe this is "rotation", because if you imagine the letters printed on a little wheel (like you'd find on a secret decoder ring found in a box of Cracker Jacks) you can see how you'd "rotate" it to decode the message. "Rotate 13" has been shortened in Internet parlance to "ROT-13" which sounds cool, but is really decoder-ring-level encryption.

My telling you doesn't break that law; after all, speech in this country is still free. But if I gave you software that did that, I'd have broken it.

Frankly, I'm embarrassed. Shouldn't the fact that a man is imprisoned in the USA for speaking freely be embarrassing? (And isn't it even more ironic that he wants to leave this repressive country so that he can return to the relative freedom of Russia?)

So read what you can, then do what you can, and free Dmitry Sklyarov. 'Cause if you don't, you might have to have some sort of a concert to free me, too.

©2001 Sean Carolan