On Monday, July 23, 2001, at 11:05 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
True. And I'll agree with you, this time -- I think the Feds will, in the end, drop this case, if the protests continue.
And I'll bet the Feds drop it because their corporate backer, Adobe, has abandoned them. They don't like to be left twisting slowly in the wind. And the more Adobe now tries to "spin" their role, the more the Feds are left twisting. The AG will likely say "Fuck that noise" (in his own Christian lingo) and the case will quietly go away. BTW, I certainly have never argued the case would receive even 1% of the attention the Wen Ho Lee or Richard Jewel cases got. But it seems to be getting about the same level of attention that Intel's "processor ID" proposal got (modulo differences in the issues). The more lasting effect is not what Joe and Alice Sixpack think of Adobe ("Huh?"), but how it energizes parts of the hacker community. A bunch of hackers are now likely to expand the cracking of Adobe's ebooks by leaps and bounds. It'll be a badge of honor.... --Tim May