Thanks HariSeldon for posting this in our BPN section. The Russian software company which has found itself on trial in an American court was acquitted on all counts of circumventing the DMCA today.
Elcomsoft"s woes began in August last year, when programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was charged under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act"s circumvention 1201 clauses (one small part of which is under review by the Librarian of Congress) while visiting Las Vegas for a technical conference. Skylarov was imprisoned for his part in creating an Adobe eBook reader that permitted fair-use of copyright material, and imprisoned pending trial.
Facing a public backlash, Adobe urged not to prosecutors not to pursue the case, and Sklyarov was freed last December in a deal where he agreed to testify in the case against his employer. The US Department of Justice picked up the reins.
While the prosecution compared Elcomsoft to Enron and tried to implicate Sklyarov with US computer hacker networks. An outraged prosecution attorney asked if Dmity had considered breaking the US law. Skyarov, who lives and works in Russia, quite reasonably said that at the time he couldn"t care less.
During the trial, it emerged that Elcomsoft"s clients include US federal law enforcement agencies, and even Adobe itself.