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Johansen Trial Underway

Posted by michael on from the wheels-of-justice dept.

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.

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Is Johansen a saint by nutshell42 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    An interesting link which was posted in the heise-forum:

    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
  2. Prosecutor got the charge wrong by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Historical intrest only by lkstrand · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Asinine by Dyolf+Knip · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "the nerds, geeks, etc. don't have a fucking clue about the legal system and yet they are trying offer commentary about it."

    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