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Jon Johansen DeCSS Trial Next Week
daniel_howell writes "Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has a story on the imminent start (after delays in finding judges qualified to hear the case) of the trial of local teenage Jon Johansen for helping to write and distribute the DeCSS program to play DVDs on a home computer. The article notes that under Norwegian law it is perfectly legal to make a copy for your own personal use. The Norwegian press is generally supportive of Johansen, and Aftenposten is usually good at posting updates to big stories like this on its English pages, so watch this space to follow the story as it unfolds."
From a text file that came with DeCSS (I'm at the cap, don't worry):
- The Truth about DVD CSS cracking by MoRE and [dEZZY/DoD] -
Date: 4th of November 1999.
By: [dEZZY/DoD], [MultiAGP & German dood of MoRE]
This document is written cooperatively by the two groups
that independently and simultaneously cracked the DVD Content
Scrambling System, in order to straighten out mass media
confusion.
DoD -> Drink or Die: "warez bearz from Russia and Beyond"
MoRE -> Masters of Reverse Engineering
[dEZZY/DoD] alone is the author of DoD DVD Speed Ripper.
MoRE is a new group and they are the authors of DeCSS.
Lately, Jon Johansen of MoRE has been pretty much all over
the news in Norway, though he had NOTHING to do with the actual
cracking of the DVD CSS protection. Yes, it was MoRE who did
DeCSS, but the actual crack was not a team effort, MoRE didn't
even exist back when the anonymous German (who is now a MoRE
member) cracked it...
Most of the papers chose a headline very similar to this:
"15-year old Norwegian cracked the DVD-code".
They probably did this because they wanted to make a big
Norwegian "Wooohoooo" out of it. This was also pretty much
the contents of the TV show "Vestfold-sendingen" where they
brought up matters from Vestfold, Norway where Jon Johansen
lives.
In most newspapers they vagely included the name MoRE, and
that DeCSS was a team effort, but neither MoRE nor DoD liked
the headlines. Jon's comment on this matter is:
"I never told the media that I had cracked the dvd encryption.
What I told them, was that we (MoRE) had made an app called
DeCSS which would decrypt dvd movies and let them be played
off your hd, or off dvdrs if you have a dvd burner. I always
used _we_ and _MoRE_ when talking to them. I never said anything
about me or my position in the group.
Now that the storm is over, I see that all they were after,
was to get a big story. They even included some of "my" quotes,
which I never said. When media starts making up stuff, it's really
sad. I know that this has been done before in Norwegian media,
regarding the cooperation between a computer group at my school
and the school people in charge of the network. All I can say is
that I'm very sorry that the media twisted my words, and even lied,
to make it appear as I had done the cracking myself. I'm pretty
sure that I will do everything to avoid the media in the future,
but if I'm forced to talk with them, I'll have to get them to
sign an agreement. Again, I apologize on the behalf of Norwegian
press, and I hope that this document will make everything clear.
The truth shall set you free."
DoD DVD Speed Ripper was developed by [dEZZY/DoD] at the
same time as DeCSS. The first release of DoD's app (which
came out a couple of weeks before the first release of DeCSS)
did not work with all (WB) titles, like The Matrix. This was
known by [dEZZY/DoD] at the time of his release. MoRE decided
to wait until they could fix this. In short time, [dEZZY/DoD]
solved the problem and MoRE's top coder/disassembler from
Germany used that information to get DeCSS working with every
movie before they released it, along with a GUI. DeCSS was then
the first application which decrypted ALL dvd titles, since DoD
had not released a new version to the public. How MoRE got
their hands on the information by [dEZZY/DoD], seems to have
something to do with the Linux community...
Why Drink or Die didn't want to release a new version so soon,
was because warez sites nuke programs that are too close in
release (minimum 2-3 weeks). Meanwhile when DeCSS came out, it
caused DoD to delay any Windows release until a GUI version of
their Speed Ripper was done. However, they released a Linux
version of their ripper late October 1999. As for the new Windows
version of the Speed Ripper, [dEZZY/DoD] has been very busy with
his education and hence the ripper is extremely delayed.
[dEZZY/DoD] already got the idea of reverse engineering a DVD
player for the CSS code back in late summer 1998. He was not able
to do it at the time since he did not have access to a DVDROM. In
the beginning of 1999, MoRE's German member also got the idea.
[dEZZY/DoD] and MoRE's German member got CSS decryption code
working at the same time (middle of September 1999), without
having shared info (although they knew about each other). After
[dEZZY/DoD] solved "the problem", MoRE's German member, as stated
above, implemented these changes and added them to DeCSS for
release.
Before DeCSS was developed and released, MoRE had already sent
the source for the decryption to their contact in the Linux DVD
community, Derek Fawcus . This is the reason
why one of Wired's news reporters was put on the case.
[dEZZY/DoD] also had relations in the Linux DVD community (who
does not want to be mentioned), but decided not to release the
source code publicly (at least not for the moment).
Enjoy the software!
- Jon Johansen [MoRE]
- anonymous German cracker [MoRE]
- [dEZZY/DoD]
They're suing him under a Norwegian breaking-in law. This law has never been used before for persecuting the breaking into your own property as the article indicates.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
...which is why most legal experts believe the case will belly-flop. It's not a DMCA-ish law, but rather a law against hacking/cracking. The key issue here is that it must be unauthorized - if you hack MPAA and take it from their server, it's unauthorized. However, the DVDs are his property and as far as most legal experts think, you can do whatever the hell you want with it.
At least that was the situation at the time of DeCSS, now the new EU copyright directive is making that illegal in EU (and by EEC-agreement, in Norway too).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just in case you wondered, "aften" means "evening".
Here's a link to the DeCSS Descramblers courtesy of Carnie Mellon
University. This is what academia is all about.
Cheers,
Woot.
#include <ianal.txt>
Technically it is not illegal to use mplayer to watch your DVD - at least, assuming nobody has a patent on the various bits of MPEG2 contained therein. (Because mplayer doesn't have the appropriate patent licenses. Although, if you own a copy of Quicktime or WMP, you probably have such a patent license, in which case you're fine. And since both QT and WMP are free downloads, you can thus acquire a patent license quite easily just by downloading the executables.)
But it is a DMCA violation to distribute mplayer. So those Hungarians are in big trouble, as are you if you put it up for your friends to download.
Of course, that is relying on the pedantic, literal interpretation of the DMCA. And we all know how far that goes when Adobe picks up the phone and sics the FBI on you.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README