ElcomSoft, a Russian company charged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with illegally selling a software decryption program that could be used to modify or bypass security features on Adobe Systems' e-books, has been acquitted of charges brought against it of violating U.S. copyright law. This case is the first test of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), a piece of U.S. legislation that was written to prevent the very type of security 'hacking' that was ruled legal in this case. Dmitry Sklyarov of Russia, then an employee of ElcomSoft, wrote the software decryption program. Adobe Systems discovered that ElcomSoft was selling Adobe's software over the Internet for $99. and filed a complaint with the F.B.I. Mr. Sklyarov was arrested by the F.B.I. in 2001 as he was preparing to appear as a guest speaker at Defcon in Las Vegas, an annual computer hackers' convention. Sklyarov was charged with five counts of violating U.S. copyright law, and eventually agreed to be a witness for the F.B.I. against ElcomSoft. ElcomSoft, based in Moscow, specializes in password-retrieval programs. Elcom's lawyers argued that the e-book decryption software sold by it was legal under Russian law.

The Director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Jennifer S. Granick, expressed agreement with the jury's finding, saying the ruling indicated that the digital copyright law has geographical limitations and that an overseas-based company can't be convicted of violating U.S. copyright law if it did not intend to break that law. "We don't want every country in the world to have to comply with how the U. S. does copyright," Ms. Granick said. "This is good for democracy: People in other countries can make determinations about what is right and wrong for themselves."

Many legal scholars think the copyright law goes too far, in part because its protections cover far more than those for non-digital works. A Law Professor at Davis School of law at the University of California in Berkeley, Pamela Samuelson, also agreed with the jury's decision, noting that the government had tried to apply the DCMA too broadly. Ms. Samuelson said that the law should apply to individuals and companies whose products are clearly used to make illegal copies; and that in the ElcomSoft case, evidence indicated that its software decryption program was used to make legitimate copies that were to be used for different hardware platforms.