He's interested in computer security systems, as am I. I'm sure we'd find plenty of things to talk about if we ever met. Not long ago he traveled from Russia, where he lives with his wife and two young children, to the U.S.A., to present a talk about his research at a technical conference; just like my talk earlier this year.

As I write this on July 21, 2001, Dmitry Sklyarov is being held without bail in a U.S. Federal detention center, facing if convicted a US$500,000 fine and five years in prison. What did he do, kill someone? No. He was arrested in connection with the talk he gave about his thesis research.

Welcome to the Digital Millennium, where computer scientists like Dmitry and I find our profession classified as a form of criminal activity. I hope you've all buckled your seatbelts, because the next thousand years are going to be one heck of a ride.

We'll leave Dmitry in his jail cell while I tell you about another of my colleagues, Dr. Edward Felten of Princeton. You may remember Dr. Felten; he was an expert witness in the Microsoft antitrust case. His research team analyzed some security technologies used by the music business, in response to a contest called the "SDMI Challenge", where a group of companies invited researchers to test the security of their schemes for controlling distribution of digital recordings.

Dr. Felten and his team, which included graduate students very much like myself, were successful in finding and manipulating the secret data hidden in the contest files. But when they proposed to give a talk at an academic conference, describing the results of their research, they were threatened with legal action. They were forced to withdraw from the conference.

If you're not part of the academic community yourself, you may not realize just what a big deal that event represents. If some professor can't give a talk, why should you care? The reason you should care is that you're a member of an industrialized society that depends on the work done by scientists like Sklyarov, Felten, and myself. If we can't do our jobs, everybody suffers. The most powerful things in our world are not physical objects, not even such apparently-powerful objects as hydrogen bombs; the most powerful things in our world are ideas. A hydrogen bomb can level one city; but an idea can destroy the entire world, or save it.

We have a system for handling ideas safely, to make sure that ideas serve us instead of destroying us. Scientists and scientific publication are important parts of that system. Strange as it may sound, we know from hundreds of years of trial and error that the only way to make sure ideas won't become destructive is to give them all away to everyone who wants them, as freely as possible.

Science doesn't work without open publication. The bottom line is that researchers have to be able to talk about whatever they want to talk about. That's why we have things like academic tenure - so that researchers can be free to do their work without worrying about whether people will like it. As professional scientists, the job of my colleagues and me is to tell you the truth; not to tell you what you want to hear. That's important work.

They jailed Dmitry Sklyarov for doing research. They threatened Dr. Edward Felten for doing research. Is Matthew Skala's research next? Could I be sued for publishing my own work? I know that the answer is "Yes," because it has already happened. In March 2000 I was one of the defendants in a lawsuit triggered by a document I co-wrote. Just like Felten and Skylarov, we didn't kill anyone, steal anyone's physical property, nor even distribute slander or hate literature: Eddy Jansson and I got in trouble just for doing mathematics and telling the truth, which is our job.

American copyright law is the common thread through all of these cases.

Dmitry Sklyarov's talk was about vulnerabilities in the encryption used by Adobe eBook files. Dr. Edward Felten and his team wrote a paper about the insecurity of schemes for controlling the use of digital audio files. Eddy Jansson and I publicized some of the design goofs in an Internet content filtering program. All were prosecuted or threatened under copyright law.

When you think of copyright law, you probably break "copyright" into its component words-the "right" to "copy". I would characterize it as the privilege to restrict copying. Either way, we imagine copyright as being all about copying things. If I write a book, and you print and sell copies of it without my permission, that's a violation of copyright. But under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1998 in the U.S.A., copyright covers much more. With digital content (such as ebooks, audio recordings, or computer software), copyright holders are allowed to booby-trap the data to restrict it in ways that ordinary copyright would not allow.

For instance, when I buy a paper book I am allowed to read it until it wears out; but with an electronic book, the publisher could say, "No, you're only allowed to read it three times, and then you have to buy a new one." The DMCA and related laws not only allow publishers to make those restrictions, but give such limits the force of law. If I read the book more than three times then I am actually breaking the law; and not only that, if I talk too much about how a person could read the book more than three times, that's "trafficking in a circumvention device" and it's a crime. That's the crime for which a graduate student of computer science a lot like me is at this moment held without bail in a U.S. Federal detention center thousands of miles from home.

The Canadian government is soliciting public comments on whether it would be a good idea for us to introduce a DMCA-style law here. I am preparing a submission for them explaining my views; if you would like to express your own opinion, there is a government information site. Space and politeness don't allow me to write all my thoughts about copyright law here, but I hope I've whetted your appetite. Whether you are in Canada, the U.S.A., or somewhere else, I'd encourage you to write to your elected representatives and let them know what you think about copyright in the Digital Millennium.

[Editor's Note: As of publication, Dmitry Sklyarov has been released on $500,000 bail while awaiting trial. Widespread protests to Adobe, which originally asked that Sklyarov be arrested, have caused Adobe to withdraw its complaint, but the U.S. government apparently plans to continue its prosecution of Sklyarov.]