Elcomsoft Co. Ltd.

The company made media headlines when in July 2001, its Russian employee Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested about the time he was to give a talk at the DefCon 9 hacking convention on a software program he developed for his company—and that was legal in Russia. His software program would let individuals convert e-books in a copy-protected Adobe software format (which is supposed to be secure) to common PDF files. If convicted, he would have faced a five-year prison sentence in the United States for violating criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Eventually, both Dmitry and his employer were cleared of any wrongdoing, and in February 2004, Sklyarov’s book entitled Hidden Keys to Software Break-ins and Unauthorized Entry was released.

See Also: Copyright Laws; DefCon; Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); Infringing Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright; Password; Portable Document Format (PDF); Skylarov; Dmitry Case.