ABSTRACT
When Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, an employee of Moscow-based ElcomSoft, travelled to the United States in 2001 to demonstrate the Advanced eBook Processor at the Def Con hacker show in Las Vegas, he was arrested by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) under the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA criminalizes technologies which circumvent a program’s access controls (such as DRM) with regard to their copyright — Sklyarov’s software was designed to remove such restrictions on Adobe eBook format fi les, thereby allowing them to be accessed on other platforms. Sklyarov’s arrest attracted considerable media attention and an international internet movement — freeSklyarov — swept the blogosphere. When Sklyarov was found not guilty — in large part due to the complicated nature of the DMCA — the extent of control that publishers could expect when releasing their content digitally became tenuous. The disability community likewise became concerned about the implications these legal measures would have on the development and use of such assistive technologies — although not their primary motivation, and not referred to in court documents nor in ElcomSoft’s (Katalov, 2001) press release, the Advanced eBook Processor benefi ted people with disability as it enabled the copying of Adobe eBooks into more accessible formats.
