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Jon Johansen Indicted by Norwegian Authorities
phlawed writes: "This story (norwegian) states that the authorities responsible for investigating economic crime in Norway today (after 2 years of "investigation") charged JLJ for violating a law regarding computer "break-ins", commonly known as the "hacker paragraph". This is for distributing the DeCSS sourcecode. The analysis so far (by media) is that the authorities not necessarily thinks JLJ is guilty, but due to unclear wording in the relevant law they seem to think that the courts should have a look at it... It is worth noting that JLJ has *not* been charged for violating any law regarding IP, piracy or such." I've only found one story in English, which is quite vague. Hopefully the above poster is correct in summarizing the situation.
.. and even though IANAL, I think the whole thing is pretty weak. He seems to be charged with paragraphs mostly used for cracking computers.
The norwegian article states that the same laws were used to prosecute people cracking TV-coding so that they could watch TV-signals without paying. The norwegian supreme court concluded that those paragraphs could not be used to punish this incident.
The weakest part to me seems to be the prosecutors words on buying a DVD:
"When you buy a DVD, you buy the right to view it, but not to copy it".
This is blatantly false, as people in Norway also have fair use rights to their purchases.
I was actually a bit shocked to see that he was prosecuted. I would understand it under the DMCA, but Norway does not have these kind of laws.
I'm bored, so I'll bite. I'll stop at your first error.
When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it...
When you purchase a DVD then you can do anything you want with it - except distribute copies of it. Manufacturers may try to contrain your use to uses that they approve of, but none of these are enforcable.
Your argument falls to bits after this cornerstone is removed.
3/10 - Must Try Harder.
Nowhere on the packaging does it say this. There isn't any indication, prior to the sale, that the usage of the DVD is so unusually restricted.
Just as when I purchase a book, I am not just paying for the ability to read it by the light of some particular manufacturer's lamp.
When you buy something, you're paying for what you expect. Sometimes when you buy something, there is a detailed contract that actually spells it out explicitly. In the case of most "consumer" things, it is not explicitly spelled out, and it's just common sense.
Also, keep in mind that when DIVX was still around, people who promoted DVDs said that one of the advantages of DVD over DIVX was that DVD was a real standard. Calling something a standard has huge implications about what you can do with it. Now that DIVX is dead, they're trying to take back what they said? Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want the larger marketshare and competitive advantages that come with adhering to a standard, then you accept that your product will be used in a manner where it interoperates with other parties that you have no relationship with. You can't have standards and monopolies at the same time. It is too late for MPAA or DVDCCA or whoever it is, to redefine what the customer's expectations are. That would be fraud.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it
When I purchase a DVD, I'm paying for a plastic or cardboard clamshell-style box, (with accompanying boxart, liner notes, etc...) containing a DVD disc - a physical object - that contains data which, under the right circumstances, can be converted to a viewable picture and accompanying sound.
If I only wanted to purchase the right to watch the movie, I'd go to a theatre, use Pay-Per-View, or go rent the movie.
Purchasing the DVD allows me to own a physical object, in the same way that purchasing a hammer, book, or notebook computer allows me to own a physical object.
If I want to use that hammer to pound nails, I can. I don't have to buy a specific brand of nails, or buy them from a specific store. I can buy any nails I want, from wherever I want, and pound them with the hammer. I can even forego the nails alltogether, and use the hammer in a manner that doesn't involve pounding anything, if I can find a use for it. I own the object.
If I want to read the book, I can. If I want to photocopy or transcribe parts of it for use in a review, educational work, etc... I can. I can even rip out all the pages of the book and use them as toilet paper if I want. I can burn all the pages of the book (as long as the resultant fire doesn't set the house alight, of course) as kindling to start a fire in the fireplace. I can put the book under a table leg to even out a wobbly table. I can make photocopies of the pages, and plaster my walls with them if I so desire. I can run the pages of the book through OCR software and a text-to-speech program to listen to it (I might be blind) I own the object.
I can disassemble the notebook computer (voiding the warranty, most likely) and put it's parts back together into a completely different machine - or mix and match parts to build a better machine. I can install any software or operating system I want. I own the object.
Yet, the argument with DVDs is that you're ot buying the object, that you're instead licensing the content on the disc. What a load of bullshit. I see no "licensing agreement" plastered on the outside of the clamshell case. Yet, if I legally purchase a notebook computer with a DVD drive (blessed by the DVD-CCA, as it's illegal to sell one that isn't) and legally purchase a DVD, unless I'm also running a blessed PLAYER, I can't play it? Bull.
In addition, if you buy a DVD player, you can (generally) only buy DVDs in the same country as the player. Unlike the hammer, where you could buy your nails in Urugway, China, or England, and still use them, with DVDs, your'e forced to only buy from the country you bought the player in. They do this so they can charge different prices in different areas of the world. This is also called price fixing, and is VERY illegal - yet because the DVD consortium is a giant monied cartel, they are able to simply buy their way around these international laws that would normally prohibit such actions.
Insanity x Insanity = Insanity. This proves that insanity is the identity element.
Having got that out the way, let's look at that quote from the lawyer a bit closer. "You buy the rights to watch the movie, not to copy it."
Pardon me for not being able to directly teleport the digital signal off the DVD, descramble it in my brain, and view it without the aid of any mechanical device. For, surely, should you require a mechanical device to view the DVD, then you must have two copies at the time of viewing. One on the DVD, and one generated by the device used for viewing.
Conclusion: To have the right to view a DVD IS to have a limited right to copy the DVD, as many times as you like, so long as the copies are transient, and exist only for the duration of viewing the DVD. (If you want to be absolutely merciless, you could argue that they can only exist for the duration of viewing a frame. But the duration WILL be non-zero, no matter how short you require it to be.)
So long as DeCSS does not, in and of itself, produce permanent or semi-permanent copies, but rather produces a stream of transient images, then it is not a copying device. It is a viewing device. To produce a copy, you must produce a means of creating a more permanent rendering.
This reminds me of a "hacking" case in England, back in the 1980's. Someone broke into Prince Philip's private e-mail account. He was accused of counterfeiting the "key", as I recall, as there was no law specifically against computer cracking at the time. The prosecution argued that typing in a password constituted posessing and using a pick-lock, which was illegal.
The defence argued that the password never actually resided on the alleged system cracker's computer, and therefore posession never occured. (Yes, they accepted, the password was -temporarily- there, but that an instantaneous existance did not qualify as residing.) If there was no posession, then the alleged cracker could not be guilty of the exact crime as charged. They then argued that the courts were there to judge the offence, as stated, not to decide the morality of the defendent.
Again, as I recall, the defence won, and a whole slew of new laws were rapidly drawin up, in an attempt to fix the mess. (The "Computer Misuse Act" dates from around this time, along with the "Data Protection Act".)
The same logic would seem to apply to Jon Johansen's case. The courts aren't there to decide if DeCSS is moral or immoral. They are there to decide if it constitutes, in this case, unauthorized access to, or unauthorized use of a computer, through the process of unauthorized duplication.
The parallels seem clear to me. DeCSS doesn't posess any copies, for the same reason. Each block of data exists instantaneously, and therefore actual posession does not occur. If no copy exists, in a legal sense, then no duplication has occured. If there is no duplication, then there is no unauthorized use - at least, in terms of what is charged. It is irrelevent, for any legal purposes, whether the use was authorized or not for anything other than what is charged. The charge is the sole concern. (At least in theory.)
Once you go down this path, you can see that the case almost has to collapse, if Jon can get a decent lawyer. Whatever your personal belief, with regards to DeCSS, whether you believe it is right, wrong or indifferent, your beliefs really are irrelevent to what the courts decide. The judge has one decision to make, and one alone: Does the law fit the facts? Yes or no. No twisting, no modifying, no reading between the lines, no adding stuff. If the answer is no, and I can't see how it could be anything else, then Jon Johannsen is innocent of the charge.
(Personally, I think he's innocent, without qualifiers, that DeCSS is a perfectly legitamate piece of software, and that lobby groups in the US are abusing their power to manipulate overseas authorities. I also think that those lobby groups should be brought to justice for such abuses of power. However, that's another matter altogether, as that's not the matter before the Norwegian courts. Although, I suspect that if such abuses were mentioned and proved by the defence, the judge would be unlikely to be sympathetic to the plaintif. Judges don't usually like being pawns. Especially in public.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it on players approved by the people who made the disc.
If that's true, and I subsequently damage the physical DVD in a way that's no-one's fault but my own, I should be able to get a replacement from the publisher for no more than the cost of the media, duplication and shipping. The fact that this isn't the case suggests that there's little legal precedent for your point.
Obviously, accidental damage may be covered by insurance, and a faulty DVD has to be replaced for no extra charge because it's not fit for the purpose for which it was sold.
The argument that you're paying for the right to listen to a piece of music too falls apart, because if that's what you'd bought, then everyone should have been able to upgrade from vinyl to CD for cost of media and distribution. That wasn't the case either.
So, the media conglomerates are trying to have their cake and eat it, selling you a piece of commodity property and a contractual obligation in one go. The free market is in the process of solving this by disintermediating them. It will just take a while to get the technology out there for musicians and fans to interact directly.