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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.
http://www.debian.org/~kju/decsstruth.txt
in short:
He stole the source, violated the GPL and didn't even have a linux-box.
I don't know whether it's true but it sounds convincing
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
State prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde claimed in an Oslo city court Monday that Jon Lech Johansen is guilty of breaching protection mechanisms in DVDs, ...
</quote>
The DVD itself is not altered. The protection mechanism that is being bypassed is in the DVD player.
According to the norwegian law professor Jon Bing, the outcome of this court is of historical intrest only:
http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=995988
The reason for this is that after DVD-Jon was accused, the EU has got the EUCD/Infosoc directive wich is the european equvialence to DMCA.
How about Galileo's trial?
Not really. I mean, in Galileo's trial, everyone understood the issues involved. They simply refused to believe them. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's not like Johansen is tried to prove something that people didn't believe. He may be convicted because the courts don't understand the issues. That's a different animal, I believe.
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?
Well, there are two literates/commoners that will be deciding his penalty. These are actually mentioned in a few of the articles, and they have first been screened on experience and skills, then the prosecution and defense have settled on the two now chosen.
I read a quote from one of Norway's most prominent geeks, Jon Bing, earlier today; "Johansen is actually charged for breaking into his own property", which could describe the entire case. He has never actually distributed the movies, which is the only thing that Norwegian laws actually forbid. (You *can* copy whatever you want for your own personal use, but you *can't* distribute them)
Further, whatever the judgement will be, this will not set legal precendence in Norway, as the DMCA (or something very similar) probably will be enforced shortly, thus overriding the older laws.
I used to believe that judges were frequently incompetent. Then I finally decided that there couldn't be that many incompetent judges. This leaves a few choices:
1) many judges have a known track record, and the da is able to manipulate which judge will hear which case.
2) many judges have been corrupted.
3) most defense lawyers are incompetent relative to most district attorneys.
4) some combination of the above
5) ??? (somthing I haven't thought of)
E.g., consider the case which declared that corporations were people. This is a totally absurd assertion, but it has been a "fact" for over a century. It is the source of much that is wrong with the US, and it traces back to one court decision involving a railway company in California during the latter half of the 1800's. If I decide that this is because of corruption, then either every supreme court since then has been corrupt, of the legal system has no means of correcting errors. If I decide that it's because of incompetence, then...
And I'm *SURE* not going to decide that it's a sensible decision.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Similarly, "the judges, the lawyers, the politicians, etc. don't have a fucking clue about technology and yet they are regularly passing summary judgement on it and destroying people's lives over issues they don't even come close to understanding." Hmmm, I wonder which is more dangerous, abusive, irresponsible, and totally reprehensible behavior?
I find it unlikely that 'GUI' and 'GNU/Linux' were the only technical terms that arose. If the prosecutor understood but didn't question the others, why these? Declan McCullagh's suggesting that the prosecutor didn't know was likely prompted by more than a simple, "Please explain for the court what a GUI is." On the other hand, 'GUI' is found pretty early on when picking up the jargon, even thumbing through a 'Computers for Absolute Dummies'...
Ah, screw it. This account is second hand from someone who admittedly doesn't know the language particularly well. Let's wait until we get the actual transcript translated by someone able to read it.
Dyolf Knip
Did you ever write code? Did you test that code? Did you test the code by throwing in unexpected parameters and seeing how the system behaved?
Maybe we ought to the same with the legal system. Take a thousand white people and a thousand black people of varying economic levels and throw them into the system. Knowing full well that every single one of them are innocent I wonder how many will come out of the system and how many will end up in jail or on death row?
As it is now. If you are 100% absolutely innocent the best thing that can happen to you if you are arrested is that you will go broke, lose your job, and lose your family and friends. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you will die. The US legal system is horrible that way. Once you are in it you are fucked royally.
War is necrophilia.