Adobe hacker given bail

US prosecutors have agreed to let Russian hacker Dmitri Sklyarov out on bail, following his arrest for controversial copyright infringement charges that have sparked waves of protest.

The prosecutors' agreement to a defence lawyer's request was rubber-stamped by a judge in San Jose, California, on Monday morning.

Sklyarov was later released on a $50,000 bond to the custody of a Russian emigre who lives in Silicon Valley.

Sklyarov has to stay in northern California until his trial, said Judge Edward Infante, and his passport is being held by US government officials.

The next hearing is set for 23 August.

Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI last month when he came to the US for the DefCon hackers' conference. It was the first arrest made under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

It is alleged that Sklyarov created a program that can crack the security in Adobe's eBooks technology, allowing the free - and illegal - distribution of electronic books.

"Trafficking in" such software is a serious felony crime in the US under a controversial three-year-old law, the DMCA. Developing such software is not a crime in Russia.

Sklyarov was arrested originally at the behest of Adobe, but faced with a potential boycott of its products, the software company called for the dropping of criminal charges and the release from jail of the programmer.

It said it backtracked because the offending software was no longer available in the US.

There was no indication on Monday that the charges will be dropped before a trial.

Outside the San Jose court, protestors from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an ardent opponent of the DMCA, were buoyed up by Sklyarov's release.

"We're very pleased about this, but this is not the end. Our long-term goal is to have the charges dropped and to get the DMCA overturned," said the EFF's staff attorney, Robin Gross.