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Johansen Trial Underway
Info is trickling in about Jon Johansen's trial In Norway, where he is accused of violating Norwegian law. Aftenposten and VG Nett have stories, and there's at least one amateur account of the trial. The trial is supposed to last a week, and I'm sure Slashdot will keep up with it, so please submit only *new* stories about it, thanks.
Classy. This is the reason why he won't get a fair trial, regardless of the outcome. The prosecution, judges, etc. don't have a fucking clue about technology and yet they are presiding over it.
Same thing goes on in the States. I don't buy the whole "technology is in it's infancy" bullshit. There are tons out out of work sysadmins. Give them books, let them take the bar exam and proceed to become a prosecutor. Everyone wins.
From the previous Slashdot article linked to above...
I've only found one story in English, which is quite vague. Hopefully the above poster is correct in summarizing the situation.
You've got to love Slashdot!
Um... What about both? Do they have a problem with that concept? :-)
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
So he goes to jail for a couple of years. It'll probably teach him to be a better member of society and not to do such criminal things as try to view copyrighted material on open source operating systems.
It occurs to me that having trials where the judge, prosecution, or defense are so technologically behind, how is one to get a fair trial?
Is this something new to computers? Are there cases in the past (like 20+ years ago) where technology or something else causing a major lack of understanding, has caused difficulties in providing fair trials?
I guess they don't even trust themselves not to post duplicate articles anymore...
To the topic at hand, from what I've read, the case against him is weak and hopefully he will prevail and deliver a much needed blow to the MPAA and DVDCCA.
If he is convicted, I hope the Norwegian people cry out the way we did when Dimitry was jailed. In this case it would be a Norwegian jailed for breaking a US law in his own country, I expect the outcry would be phenominal. If so, hopefully whoever their president/primeminister/etc is has pardon powers and uses them before things get out of hand.
It will be interesting to see... in any case, I'm going to light a candle for Jon this holiday season and hope that he comes out on top, not because its right for fair use, but because its unjust to take a man's freedom for something like this.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
The more you know (on anything), the more you realize how terrible the news media is. It's disturbing when you see how things are wrong/misreported/overblown on something you know, and then consider that the same thing is going on with the things you don't know as much about.
Neither the defence nor the prosecution seem to be that technologically aware. They might as well be arguing over the best design for a fast breeder reactor based on legal precedent.
Jon didn't do the reverse engineering, but lets assume that he's involved with the people. Now then they reverse engineered a piece of software. I'm not sure exactly wha the Norwegian legal point of view is on this, but many countries have a specific exception that you may reverse engineer a piece of software for purposes of interoperability, even if you have agreed not to.
The fact is that a piece of code is readable by a human. The fact that it is in a cryptic format makes this a little harder, but not impossible. I can quite happily go through a binary file, with a piece of squared paper, writing down what will happen, just as easily as I can taker a car to pieces to see how that works.
However, my opinion as a technology using citizen of the world that routinely watches DVDs that I purchased and own in Linux is this: Any judge that possesses an ounce of common sense would wrap this case up in favor of the defendant in a day. The kid/man owns the DVDs, the CSS encryption is not in place to protect anything other then access. He did not gain unlawful access to anything, and furthermore did not harm or effect the DVD (which he owns) in any way. I would imagine that the judge has heard of reverse engineering, and understands that it is legal.
Bah, this all pointless. They should just bring in a group of Korean protestors and make it interesting.
Thus Johansen is charged with:
6 614
"breaking a Norwegian law which prohibits people breaking into others' locked property to get data that they're not supposed to obtain. This is the Norwegian Criminal Code section 145(2).
But Johansen owned the DVD, while the law was used in the past to prevent access to banks, telecomms companies, or other systems to look at others' records.
Said Cindy Cohn, the EFF Legal Director: "Jon owned the DVDs and he's never been accused of copyright infringement or assisting in copyright infringement. He's facing criminal charges for taking the necessary steps to view his own DVDs on his own computers."
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=