Russian Programmer Not Eager to be Celebrity

[Declan McCullagh]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 09:06:48PM -0500, measl at mfn.org wrote:
> I cannot express how fed up I am with this type of tunnel-vision
> HYPOCRISY.
> 
> The same folks who are screaming that writing public crypto code must be
> covered by the 1st because "it is good" are screaming that Sklyarov is now
> "bad" because he writes spamware.  One idiot went so far as to call for
> Sklyarov's *execution* because he may have written the program that was
> once used to send UCE/UBE to the miscreant whiner! 

There are two obvious ways to defend Sklyarov:

* This person is a great guy, wife, two kids, smart, grad student,
academic, researcher, programmer, cryptologist, etc. He didn't do
anything except piss off Adobe, and the DMCA is unconstitional anyway,
so let him go free.

* Okay, Sklyarov may be a spamware writer and we may worry about his
poor sense of ethics and in fact he's not someone we'd want to spend
any time with in person, but he should go free since the DMCA is
unconstitutional and spamware, though we hate it, is 1A-protected.

I think the antispammers are taking position #2. Nobody I have read
says he should be locked up because of writing spamware.

-Declan