Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Repeat after me: Europe is not one country.
Of course, the EU will probably create it's own EU-wide DMCA soon bought to you by the usual suspects, but that's neither here nor there."
Europe is not one country yet. Europe does not have its own continent-wide DMCA yet. The point I was trying to make is that if Europeans do not start paying some more attention to the awful shit their own leaders do, you are all eventually going to end up living in states that are just as corporatized as the US has become, and many of you don't have nearly as many constitutionally guaranteed rights to things like freedom of religion, speech, and assembly that the US does.
I am warning the Europeans: letting Johansen be indicted like this is a very, very bad thing. It starts in Norway, it will spread out across Europe and eventually your human rights will be given away to protect the profits of multinational corporations, all in the name of protecting IP rights of corporations that cooperate to scam artists out of the rights to content they created in the first place.
I say all this because over and over again I see Europeans on the internet complaining about American companies being behind all of this, and commenting about the US government as some far reaching arm of corporate power. But I rarely see Europeans complaining about their own leaders being coerced into working against them for these corporations, most of which operate in far too many countries to really be considered American (And many of the companies involved, like Sony or Virgin were never American in the first place.). Right now you all have a very good chance make some noise and get your leaders in line. Don't blow it.