Jon Johansen DVD Trial Date Set

mpawlo writes: "As reported by Greplaw, the Norweigan 'Byrett' (district court) will try the Jon Johansen DVD case on December 9, 2002. The trial was supposed to take place this summer, but the court decided to postpone the trial to find a technology savvy judge. The case will be tried by one judge and a panel of two lay assessors. Jon Johansen is being prosecuted by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (OKOKRIM) under Norwegian Criminal Code 145(2). Johansen created DeCSS software that can enable DVD playback on Linux. It is argued that the DeCSS software is a piracy tool." Here is the Greplaw story with more links.

Comments

What?

[Telastyn]

It is a piracy tool.
It's also a tool with legitimate usage.
The question is wether the law still counts when the tool has a reasonably legitimate use.

Congrats to the Norwegians for taking the time for a fair trial by a competant judge.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it a piracy tool? Please explain this.

You can copy DVD's just fine without DeCSS. Just go ask Hong Kong or Korea.

Re:What?

[King of the World]

By decoding the DVD video it enables reencoding at a filesize that's easier to download and trade online. The popular 400 meg ASF movie files are the result of this, and I doubt if they would be so popular if it were a 4 GIG download for quality that most people don't care about.

Re:What?

[Cally]

It's a priacy tool.

It's funny, there's a guy with a foldout table outside my local tube station (Brixton, London, UK) selling DVDs - often of films which are still on theatrical release, or indeed have only just opened - and I'll eat my hat if deCSS was used for *any* of them. Why should a copyright infringer go to all the trouble of decrypting an MPG video file when the encrypted version will play just fine on Fred Bloggs' standard home DVD player? So someone can tie up their broadband connection for a couple of hours, uploading a ripped film to total strangers - for *free*?? Get real, these blokes want to make MONEY! They can do that selling encrypted DVDs to people owning normal players much, much more easily than trying to sell them on the net.

Re:What?

[martyn s]

No, this is not the prefered method. There are other DVD decrypters besides DeCSS, but they all just rip .VOB files and therefore makes it much easier to reencode movies, and swap it over the internet. In fact, I'm in middle of re-encoding a twilight zone DVD, which I ripped by using a program which decrypted the DVD first (I don't think it used DeCSS tho).

Even though it might be easy to do it the way you're describing, it would still take significantly longer to rip it, and the fact is no one does it that way.

I'm not trying to say anything one way or the other about what this should mean about the legality of this, I'm just telling you how people who actually rip DVDs do it.

Original Trial meaningless.

[Lord Bitman]

It seems to me that, according to law, he is guilty. The original trial is meaningless, since he can only be found guilty, if the system works the way it is supposed to. In an ordinary court it is only to determine whether a law has been broken. One [at least] _HAS_ been broken. It is not until the appeals proccess that it can be determined whether those laws are in question.

I wonder

[zurab]

1. whether they will be able to point to any DVDs that have been pirated from the use of his code and his code only, not somebody else's; and how they will be able to prove that it was his code.

2. if they do find his code used for piracy why would they not find VCRs, analog cables, DVD drives, and computers to be piracy tools also.

2a. if they find pirated material created with his code, and are able to prove it, why wouldn't they go after the actual pirates rather than going after him. Because his code does have other non-pirate uses.

Legitimate Usage

[Bonker]

It's just like the idiots who want to outlaw balacavas. Sure, they're 'terrorist masks', but if you've ever been in the cold for long enough, they're simply a necessary fact of life.

For a good deal of fair-use DVD software, DeCSS was a necessary step.

Case in point: Circumventing region restrictions. No way, no how are region restrictions in any way protected under copyright law. Neither is not playing the disk on the OS of your choice.

Even if you want to complain that he wrote code for Windows rather than Linux, here's an example from my own situation, since I use windows for media tools: For a long time, (until a firmware patch came out) my mobo would not support DMA to my DVD drive under Windows 2000. This means fairly slow access speed and jerky, out-of-sync playback in any of the good software DVD players for win32. By ripping the DVD to my harddisk, however, I can watch it at normal quality settings. Without DeCSS and rippers based on it, I wouldn't be able to do that.

This is the type of thing that make me afraid

[scode]

Honestly.

I mean, this is not just some minor licensing issues or whatever. People are actually trying to put other people in jail for writing software that enables people wo watch DVD:s they have payed for. That's exactly what's happening - why can't the people adovacting this crap see that?

*sigh*

Re:Jon Johansen's Age

[rmassa]

Actually, you should be the one opening your eyes to a bigger picture.

Diluting the percieved crime is the best way to find the parties who are most culpable. The people who are at fault in this case are the ones who _pirate_ the movie and use the tool that John wrote for non-legal purposes, not those people who want to watch a dvd on their damn linux box. What this kid did was not (or should not be) illegal. What people are using his tool for is illegal. You can't imprison someone for creating something that "might" be used for illegal purposes, if their intent and wish for developing that tool was for something that should be perfectly legal. (watching a DVD that you purchased with your own money).

Diluting this issue is exactly what should be done, because we don't charge gunsmiths with murder. (Even though guns see their most widest use in killing people)

Re:Distribution

[topham]

Somebody one day is going to have to explain to me why breaking a license related to Copyright is a criminal act, while breaking a contract is civil...

Oh wait, because somebody bought the legislature...