Shoot. I Missed DefCon.

August 11th, 2002

However, Vin Suprynowicz did not. He attended, and later filed an op-ed:

Attorneys Joe Burton and Bill Reilly did an interesting presentation on Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian “Elcomsoft” engineer busted by the feds after doing a presentation here at DefCon a year ago on how to decrypt PDF files, which the publishing industry interprets as a violation of its prized Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Basically, those amid the sea of post-adolescent faces that surrounded me at DefCon don’t believe any copyright holder should be able to charge what they see as outlandish prices for years and years for music or movies or any other piece of “intellectual property” if these young conventioneers can find a way to access and download it for free. These cybernetic enfants terribles laugh at the kind of security locks we gray-hairs try to build into these products — the roof tent broke out in peals of laughter when one speaker described the way the anti-copying protections on a typical CD can be defeated by simply marking up a part of it with a black Sharpie. (Whoops, by reporting that, did I just violate the DMCA? Is Dano even now on his way with the cuffs?)