Sklyarov's year: Arrested, jailed, freed - and baffled

Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov thinks it was unfair of prosecutors to play his videotaped deposition at the ElcomSoft trial rather than calling him to the stand.

But after a legal saga that's included a surprise arrest outside his Las Vegas hotel room, three weeks in jail, and visa tangles that almost prevented him from returning to the United States for trial, Sklyarov has decided not to worry about situations over which he has no control.

"During my life I'm trying not to spend too much time trying to find what means for me things I cannot change," Sklyarov, 27, said in his first interview since testifying in the criminal copyright case of ElcomSoft, his employer.

Speaking with the careful phrasing of someone communicating in a foreign language and still bound by an agreement to cooperate with the US government, Sklyarov talked with silicon's sister site, CNET News.com, about life after his arrest, his impression of the case, and his opinions about how the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is affecting programmers.

The meeting took place during a break in the trial at a restaurant across the street from the boxy, gray corporate apartment his company has kept since it became the target of US prosecution 17 months ago. The interview was given with the understanding it would not run until the ElcomSoft trial ended and Sklyarov was no longer under the terms of the government agreement.

On Tuesday, a jury acquitted ElcomSoft of all counts against it in the first case to test the criminal provisions of the DMCA, a US law aimed at updating intellectual property rules for the computer age. Although jurors agreed the product was illegal because it was designed to crack antipiracy technology controls, they declined to convict because they didn't believe ElcomSoft intended to break the law.

Sklyarov said many information security developers have been skittish since learning of his case, fearful that they, too, could face jail time for their work. "Nobody knows. Probably you'll do your work, and after that somebody comes for you to arrest you or something like that because the DMCA is very (broadly) written and many things can be linked with DMCA," he said.

Sklyarov catapulted to code-jockey fame in July 2001 when he was arrested after giving a speech about his company's Advanced eBook Processor, software designed to crack protections on Adobe Systems' eBooks. Prosecutors argued the product violated the DMCA, which outlaws offering software that can circumvent copyright protections.

Sklyarov was jailed for three weeks, his case becoming a flashpoint for the battle between copyright owners seeking to maintain control over their material in the digital age and programmers working to highlight security flaws.

But after worldwide protests among programmers, Adobe backed away from its support of Sklyarov's prosecution, and government attorneys set aside charges against him in exchange for his testimony in the remaining case against his company.

Although Sklyarov returned to the United States specifically to testify as a government witness, prosecutors never called him to the stand. In a highly unusual move, the government decided to play an hour-long edited videotape of Sklyarov's deposition instead. Sklyarov said he didn't find out until the day before he was scheduled to appear as a government witness that he would not be called to the stand.

"It's unfair," Sklyarov said of the government's plan to play a tape of him. The "government could ask questions and show them on tape, but (the) defendant couldn't ask cross questions."