Help the blind, go to jail

[joel]

FYI, Dmitry Sklyarov has just been indicted on five counts of circumventing 
copyright control. I'm sending this to a lot of people I know:

Hi,

You know I normally don't send these things, but I think this one is 
extremely important, if we want to live in a free country. 

On Tuesday, August 28, 2001, a Russian programmer named Dmitry Sklyarov was 
charged with a crime in the United States. The crime? Writing a program that 
enables blind people to access books stored in Adobe's proprietary eBook 
format. Under a new US law (the DMCA), it is now a felony to use any 
controlled electronic file in a way that has not been explicitly permitted by 
the publisher. 

In Russia, where Dmitry wrote his program, Adobe's eBook software is illegal 
because it also prevents people from being able to print or back up the 
products that they bought. In America, we too have a right to fully use the 
products we buy, but our government hasn't made it illegal for private 
companies to restrict those rights. Dmitry's program made it possible for 
Russian consumers to use their eBooks as allowed by law. Here, enabling 
people to use the products they buy has become a felony.

For more information about Dmitry's case, see any of these sites:

http://www.freesklyarov.org/
http://www.anti-dmca.org/
http://www.eff.org/

You can help!

Raising public awareness of this issue is very important. Please forward this 
message to other people you know, and ask your congressional representative 
to free Dmitry, and repeal the DMCA.

Thank you,

--Joel