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Update On The Jon Johansen Trial
nordicfrost writes "The trial against Jon Johansen goes on. Today, John Hoy of the DVD CCA was examined by phone by the defense and the prosecutor in Oslo. We have set up a page to follow the main events in the trial here, in English. The documentation of evidence, and the fact that Hoy didn't answer the phone when the court called, delayed the trial so the final proceedings may not be finished before Monday afternoon." Update: 12/12 23:50 GMT by T : This wasn't really a Science story ...
...when someone who would be a star witness does the telephone equivalent of not showing up in court? I wouldn't think that this would completely blow the case against the defendant, but I would imagine that many judges wouldn't give the prosecution much slack if they pulled a stunt like that.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Incase anyone forgot, This is the guy that wrote DeCSS (The program that lets people decode dvds so they can be played in free operating systems).
More info on the trial at Google News (Wouldnt it be cool if slashdot automagicly added a google news link to stories to show all relevant links?)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
No. The tenets of basic economics are hurting the legitmate consumers every time the MPAA accuses someone of stealing DVDs. The fact of the matter is that DVD piracy is almost nonexistent in North America - unlike MP3s, which can be and are downloaded and burned to CD in minutes, inexpensively. The time and cost of copying DVDs is huge in comparison. DVD piracy just isn't here on a large enough scale to warrant any price increase. Its the same reason gas prices are on the rise in every country on the planet - its making a very small number of people very, very rich.
DeCSS is, in theory, an excellent piece of coding. The problem, as is true with technologies along its lines, is that there is quite a bit of room for abuse.
I think the key here is rather than trying to put this guy away, DVD manufacturers should work with the DeCSS technology to find a happy medium. Obviously, free OS's will need some way to play DVD's, so it makes sense that the technology should expand to include these users. Just putting people on trial in hopes that all these issues will go away is ludicrous. If DVD manufacturers are worried about their products being pirated, imagine the response when the creator of DeCSS gets jailed. This isn't the way to go about it.
Of course, people who can legitimately play DVD's shouldn't exactly be going around DeCSS'ing every DVD and distributing it on Kazaa or your filesharing program of choice. Abusing the technology is just as big a problem as those trying to shut it down.
"It never got weird enough for me." - HST (RIP)
You may also remember me from a meeting at work -- I was the one who asked you to repeat what the group had just talked about, because my disabilities prevented me from paying attention the first time.
I work in marketing.
Yup. Should be on your nearest P2P network by the end of the week. Due to the marvel of 0-day war3z, we'll know what the verdict is before Johansen does.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Hmm,
I speak English,Spanish, Portequese, and a smattering of french. Born and bred in the US.
I would say that comment is far from the truth though. Even though Slashdot is a US based site so english the language and maybe the rest of you guys are interlopers. So why should citizens of an English Speaking country, visiting an english speaking site, be expected to speak another language? You like slashdot, so you read it in English.
I tend to disagree with that comment because with all the anti-american sentiment that floats around here that most people are foreigners(Canadians included). So I would say I good many of us speak another language.
I agree that many people in the US dont have another language when they should.
1. They dont see the necessity, as English is the dominant business language in the world. You need it for international business.
2. You go anywhere and people speak English because we are big tourists.
3.The US is not in proximity with other countries so we do not have the necessity or luck of having to learn another langauge. Europe you guys are all bordered next to each other, short hops in between, easy to travel. Easy to learn another langauge.
I think you are trolling. 45% of the US speaks spanish I beleive. We latinos are falling out the woodwork.
And most people on slashdot are fairly intelligent, including us North Americans, well traveled, and gasp, speak other languages.
We aint as dumb as you think. Course then Germans are all Nazis, Italian women are all Harry, I could go on.
Jeez
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I can't beleve that I am replying to a troll... You really think that the Million's of dollars that the MPAA is spending on prosecuting people in other countries isn't inflating the cost of DVD's faster then the "losses" from DVD pirating? This isn't even a DVD pirating ring of criminal masterminds... THis is a smart kid that was proving to himself that such a thing could be done. He wasn't profiting from the MPAA's IP, I bet he didn't even own a DVD burner. It is the high cost entertainment and IP laywers spending endless hours figuring out who they can sue to keep their job and Porche that are driving the (already over-inflated) cost of DVDs up. Not a 16 year old kid who can reverse engineer a weak encryption scheme.
:)(smile)
When you read about Jon Johansen you shold realize that he is not a hero. Not only did tok credit for stuff other people did, he broke the GPL. http://people.debian.org/~kju//decsstruth.txt. However one thing he did not do was break norwegian law. The aternoey representing the state is even having trouble figuring out what illegal he has done. People talk about how this is important in regard to similar cases that may accure in the future. I say we found a pretty lousy guy to represent 'us'.
... because police confiscated his cell phone - thinking it was a hacking instrument??
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Come on folks, virtually everybody in Scandinavia can read and write English, who the heck did that translation? It reads like it was translated from the original Japanese into English by a unilingual Cantonese speaker then translated into Norwegian by a drunken Scotsmen, only to be translated back into English by a committee of patent attorneys.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
What Hoy is insinuating here, is that the DVD CCA has a government granted monopoly on anything CSS related. Judge Kaplan bought it, but it's simply not true. If the DVD CCA wanted a monopoly on decoding DVDs, they should have applied for a patent.
I don't know what the law is in Finland, but in the United States it is unconstitutional for the government to mix patents and copyrights.
I've got an excerpt from the court reporter:
"Derp de derp."
1. They want to recieve license fees for every dvd-capable video player in existence.
2. They want every dvd-capable video player in existence to work by their rules-- i.e., the ones that allow content producers to completely set what it is possible to do with each disc.
I agree, but think you miss the point here:
the linux community" will not truly be happy using a closed source video player-- there will always be the person upset he couldn't play dvds on his 10-year-old sparc because the "approved" propeitary player is x86 and PPC only. But much more importantly, this is a problem because open source platforms inherently empower the user.
That user has every right to be angry, as do you. The DVD consortium has, with help from a few friends, make it a crime for you to figure out how to use your own equipment or even tell others how to do the same. It's a concept that matters and should not be belittled with absurd examples like trying to make a computer that does not have an IDE interface run a DVD player. Trade secrets should have no force outside of a signed contract, and should never trump free speech. My purchasing a DVD player is not equivalent to me signing a contract. "Open" OS only empower users to the extent that they have source code. If you don't have the power to help your friends do things there will be no free code and no Open OS and you will be at the mercy of those who exploit you to maintain tools you can't use.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It reads like it was translated from the original Japanese into English by a unilingual Cantonese speaker then translated into Norwegian by a drunken Scotsmen, only to be translated back into English by a committee of patent attorneys.
It looks like you've discovered the "technology" behind Babelfish.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
You know something? I am sick and tired of people claiming that they actually know something about masses of people in other countries. You don't. You don't have the slightest idea how many Americans can locate Iraq on a map. You don't have the slightest idea how many residents of Airstrip One know that Iraq, err, Oceania hasn't always been our enemy, nor do you have the slightest idea how many residents of the United States are polyglots. You know what? Neither do I. People hear a statistic about how many people in this population are ignorant of a fact the poll-taker believes everyone should know, and from this people draw absurd conclusions about the overall ignorance of an entire population!
The irresponsible parroting of statistics is a far more pervasive and detrimental social phenomenon than American ignorance or arrogance.
American's look ignorant overseas because of a simple phenomenon that is certainly not confined to the USA: Ignorant people are loudmouths. Ignorant people believe their prejudices are facts, and they give voice to every damnfool idea that comes into their heads because they do not know that they do not know anything
It would be best if you took a good look at your own attitudes and inflammatory statements before you accuse Americans as a class, as if there were a monolithic "American" opinion or personality.
I'm not proud of of my country's present administration. My overall impression is that George W. Bush may be one of the least intelligent people to hold the Presidency in many years. I understand that the world is nervous about a "cowboy" President backed by an angry population, and so am I. But remember that while this man appears popular in our polls, this is more a result of our collective outrage than an endorsement of the policies of this administration. Remember he was barely elected, and some still dispute that he was elected. In two years there will be another election, and even if he wins, in four more years he will be out.
Will we start another war? Personally, I doubt it. But let me ask you this: Would there be UN inspectors in Iraq right now if the threat had not been built to a very real level? Diplomacy sometimes has a gunboat component. So even here, while I do not personally know what our government intends, an intelligent person may draw a very different conclusion from the facts than you appear to do.
Ignorance and arrogance are clearly not confined to the United States. The fact that America weilds vast military power does, I grant you, make American ignorance and arrogance of greater import. But even here, consider that North Korea is flexing its nuclear muscles again because Pyongyang (Wow! He knows a foreign capital!) has made the reasonable calculation that we cannot build up the interational tolerance nor perhaps the military capability for two engagements a continent apart. Perhaps America is under greater constraints than you realize.
So this jejune attitude of superiority requires some additional reflection, perhaps, on both sides of the ocean.