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Jon Johansen Trial Continues
An anonymous reader writes "The Norwegian prosecution has been allowed to change the indictment in their case against "DVD-Jon" Johansen. There is an English language article on Friday's trial proceedings now available." VG.nett is also covering the trial.
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...before it gets slashdotted:
Prosecution changes charges against "DVD-Jon"
The prosecution in the trial of Jon Lech Johansen, known as "DVD-Jon" due to his connection with a computer program to decrypt DVD copy protection codes, presented amended charges in court on Friday.
The changes largely reflect Økokrim - Norway's special force for economic crime - wanting to include charges that Johansen also cracked code that revealed a repository of protection keys. According to the prosecution, this made it possible for the decryption program DeCSS to work on a wide range of films.
Johansen's defense counsel, Halvor Manshaus, opposed this new development, saying he felt it changed the very nature of the indictment, which the prosecution is not allowed to do while the trial is in progress.
Prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde argues that the changes only make the original indictment more precise, and so do not represent new charges.
After consideration Manshaus withdrew his objection to the changes, not waiting for a ruling from the judge.
"I have objections to how this is done - that changes come now, so late in the trial. I have now formal objections against the changes themselves, rather that we now, after the presentation of evidence is over, get this change - which in my opinion comes without sufficient supporting evidence," Manshaus said.
"Such a formal objection would mean that we would have to present new evidence and this would in practice lead to a deferment of the trial and we have no interest in that," Manshaus said.
Throughout the proceeding Manshaus has been extremely brief, trying to get the prosecution to concentrate on what he feels are the actual charges and presenting his counter-arguments far more quickly.
The trial was originally scheduled to conclude with closing arguments on Friday. This will now take place on Monday, primarily to allow the defense to adjust arguments to reflect the newly worded indictment. Judgment will not fall until after New Year.
This was the third time the charges against Johansen change. This spring Økokrim amended the indictment to complicity with cracking DVD codes, which means that they do not have to prove that Johansen acted alone. Just before the start of the trial Johansen's defense counsel had the wording of the charges slightly adjusted.
The trial this week has been dominated by the prosecution's painstaking attempts to argue that Johansen deliberately contributed to the removal of copy protection of DVD films leading to their free distribution on the Internet.
DVDs have a reserve of 408 encrypted keys, where at least one must correspond to a key in the DVD-player in order to access the data. According to Johansen himself, the original DeCSS contained only one key, but this was later expanded thanks to the efforts of friends on the Internet.
Johansen's defense argues that he and his friends only cracked the code in order to play films legally purchased on a computer using the Linux operating system.
Much of Friday morning's trial time was spent documenting online conversations between Johansen and his friends.
DeCSS, was published in 1999 and widely associated with Johansen via reports in the media. Specialist circles have debated Johansen's level of involvement with the actual codebreaking. Johansen also made the program freely available for download via the Internet.
Here is a short event log of how things happened.
What the Norvegian prosecutor is doing is claiming that Jon broke the protection on the DVD keyblock. He didn't.
In fact it was a real professional cryptographer Frank Stevenson that demonstrated how to (a) defeat CSS without a key and (b) how to recover all the keys from the keyblock.
And yet the brave Norvegian prosecutor is going after a kid ... His ancestors must be turning wildly in their graves ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
It's part of the Monty Python skit.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Anyway, you can change details in the indictment, but only details to make it more precise. The defence can protest, in case you would have to start the whole trial all over. First, the defence objected strongly, but then, they probably just went "WTF, whatever, either the judges have allready got the clue, that the prosecutor is a dirty, rotten corrumpted maniac, which she has made abundantly clear during this trial, in which case it doesn't matter, or they haven't grasped it yet, and then there's the appeal, so lets just get it over with."
First of all, the trial isn't secret. I've been attending all of it since Monday. The change to the indictment was done with the defender's agreement (he said he thought it was very weird that Økokrim wanted to charge Jon for having gained access to the lock itself. Locks aren't protected by any law.) If the defender had disagreed, the trial would have been restarted, but the amount of extra time that would have taken, combined with the stupidity of the change made the defender think it wasn't worth it (or so he said.)
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The article says: The trial this week has been dominated by the prosecution's painstaking attempts to argue that Johansen deliberately contributed to the removal of copy protection of DVD films leading to their free distribution on the Internet.
But as far as I know, you don't need to decrypt a DVD in order to pirate it. You can just copy the encrypted data, optionally post it on the internet for your friends to copy, then burn the encrypted data onto a blank DVD. Isn't that right?
If that's true, then the prosecution case is considerably weakened. You only need deCSS if you want to convert the video to another, more convenient format.
Doug Moen
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This looks like a crime to me.
This is pretty standard courtroom stuff in the U.S., though - the prosecution can pretty much bring new charges, and ask to dismiss existing ones, any time they can talk a grand jury into making the new indictment. The only difference is that you'd essentially have to start a new trial, but all of the evidence from the old one would still be a matter of record. There is nothing unfair about this.
For those who are saying that they got the testimony, and then changed the charges: it's not like you get immunity for anything you say on the stand, right? If I am on trial for theft, and I happen to own up to a murder, you can bet that I'll be on trial for murder pretty soon too. If you broke the law in more ways than one (not that I can tell whether he did or not), don't admit it in court if you can avoid it. In the U.S., invoke the 5th Amendment.
The only issue would be if the law itself was changed following testimony; there would then be an ex post facto issue (although who knows how that works in Norway) that would seem to make the trial unfair. But just adding new charges because the defendent admitted to supposedly illegal behavior in open court is not unethical; the defendant and his counsel should know what the law is and have some idea of how to steer clear of other potential dangerous admissions during their defense on the first charge.
I wish Jon all the best - I think he should be considered innocent. But it doesn't help to make it seem like there's some vast legal conspiracy against him; the events so far have been accepted elements of justice systems worldwide for centuries.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
While I find the idea of being able to change .slimy, it's their court of law. /.ers for Norway care to comment?
charges in mid-stream a little. .
What I do find chilling is that it seems the burden of proving that the change shouldn't be done is on the defense, rather than having the prosecution provide
the burden of proof that the change should be done. Any
No, the burden of proof is indeed on the procecution's side. However, the proof may scrutinized by the defense. If the defense objects, the court will rule on the issue.
In this case, the defense must have felt that the court would rule in favor of the prosecution, and/or that it wasn't worth fighting over.
Note that the Norwegian legal system is not like the anglo-saxon tradition, where a defense and prosecution fight eachother over two different versions of events,
it's more like the german tradition where the defense and prosecution work from two different viewpoints towards finding a single truth.
Just thought I should point out that this isn't a Jury trial. In Norway, one doesn't have the right to a jury trial. Nonetheless, your point is valid, and even more relevent, since a judge is much more likely to notice this than an untrained jury.
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