Follow-up of Lawrence Lessig

[Warren Togami]

http://lwn.net/2001/features/LawrenceLessig.php3

Immediately after his excellent keynote speech at LinuxWorld, he was
interviewed by LWN.

excerpts from the article:

Should free software authors fear being arrested in the same fashion as
Dmitry Sklyarov was for writing proprietary code?
I don't think they should fear it. I think that the government strategy is
now clear. They intend to make Sklyarov a scapegoat; have a couple
prosecutions under the DMCA. Once they succeed in getting pretty severe
penalties against Sklyarov they'll count on that scaring the rest of the
people away. Right at this minute, I don't think they will be pushing any
other prosecutions.

After the arrest of Dmitry one of our readers, Richard Simpson, wrote from
the UK with a chilling analogy to the extension of US jurisdiction in that
case. Ali is a second generation US citizen living in California. He is keen
home brewer and runs a home brewing web site with recipes in English and
Arabic. One day he visits some relatives in Saudi Arabia. On arrival the
Saudi police arrest him because his US based web site breaks Saudi law. It
that a fair analogy to the extension of US jurisdiction over Dmitry?

It is close. We should be thinking of this kind of analogy. The one
difference in Dmitry's case is that it wasn't just that there was a passive
web site available. The government would argue that Elcomsoft took steps to
distribute their software into the United States. It is that affirmative
effort at distribution in the United States that gives ground for the
jurisdiction. Now some countries or some jurisdictions have taken the view
that even just passive web sites could ground jurisdiction. But I do not
think that will ultimately be the law.