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.

Comments

DVD Ripping Guides in Linux

[Guiri]

Too see how things have changed ;) here are some DVD ripping under Linux guides.. http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de

How it happened .. (almost)

[AftanGustur]

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 ..

Re:Uhh...Umm...Ano...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm, in Norway, and for that reason I'm posting anonymously, I don't want those moronic idiots coming after me if they don't loose.

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."

Don't need deCSS to pirate DVDs?

[dmoen]

This is really a technical question.

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