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from Associated Press on Wednesday, December 11, 2002

A young Russian computer scientist who has become a lightning rod for hacker rights was unrepentant as he took the stand in his company's trial on copyright violation charges.

Dmitry Sklyarov, 27, was arrested last year after attending a Las Vegas hacker convention for developing a program that disabled security features in the eBook reader made by Adobe Systems.

"I believed that it (was) legal. I still believe that it is absolutely legal," Sklyarov, a programmer for Elcomsoft Co. Ltd. of Moscow, told a federal jury Monday in thickly accented English.

"My intent was to allow people who legally own books to use them as they like, to read them on any computer," the slim, sandy-haired Sklyarov said.

He said he also developed the program for the "practical application" section of his doctoral thesis on methods of analyzing software protection systems. "The program I developed demonstrates flaws in security systems."

Sklyarov, who is an assistant professor at Moscow Technical University, was the first defense witness in a trial that has drawn international attention because it is the first criminal case brought under the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Elcomsoft and its CEO Alex Katalov are charged with selling software that permits removal of restrictions imposed by the publishers of electronic books. Adobe's software allows the sale of electronic books in formats that, depending upon "permissions" established by the publisher, prohibit the content from being copied, printed or transferred.

Sklyarov had originally been charged along with his employer following his July 2001 arrest.

But following three weeks in Nevada and Oklahoma jails and almost four months of being restricted to northern California, the government agreed to drop charges against him in return for his testimony against Elcomsoft.

Although Sklyarov was subpoenaed as a government witness, prosecutors did not call him during their case last week, choosing instead to play for the jury parts of his videotaped deposition taken last year.

Sklyarov testified that his eBook program is based upon a decryption component identical to an earlier product he developed called the Advanced PDF Password Recovery Program that is used to obtain passwords to secure Adobe portable document format - or PDF - files.

The PDF format has become an Internet standard.

Although Sklyarov acknowledged under cross examination that he might have engaged in some reverse-engineering of Adobe's product to produce his software, he didn't consider that illegal because Russian copyright law gives every person a right to make copies.

Vladimir Katalov, Elcomsoft's managing director and brother of the company president, testified that his company is still selling the PDF password recovery program and, in fact, has sold that software and other products designed to retrieve passwords on Microsoft, WordPerfect and Lotus products to many law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice itself.

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