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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.
You can change the charges in mid trial? Smells like BS. I can't quite place why. But it smells fowl.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Yes, of course all the hacker-hype is there to confuse the judges. If the persecutor manages to convince the judge(s) that, if they let Jon go, they'll be all over the newspapers as soft on hackers and terrorists, they're not going to let Jon go even if they think he's innocent. It worked with Kaplan and 2600. Hopefully, judges in Norway will be a bit smarter.
In danger of maybe repeating earlier posts, I thought I'd add a link to Håkon Wium Lie's (CTO in Opera Software and the guy behind Cascading Style Sheets) view on the current DVD trial case. He sees clear analogies between the movie business' wish to decide how the content of a DVD should be played, and the wishes of Microsoft and the likes who among other things want to use proprietary and possibly encrypted formats on the Web.
Yes, you are correct. A friend of mine who worked for Intel on CSS said the encryption is so weak they had to hide the algorithm itself from decompilers and such.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
Actually, the prosecutor's case rests more or less solely on this post. Jon has posted a very interesting message to the mailing list of Electronic Frontier Norway (at my request) that quite clearly shows this is badly out of context.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
this is assuming that you can get hold of the encrypted data. i'm no expert in this field, but you'll need a dvd drive that can read the raw data...i don't think that's easy to come by. but i could be way wrong on this
did he??
Except DOS 4.0 and a few other misc. things.
> If you want to create your own encrypted DVDs, you can buy special [more expensive] 'Authoring'
> media, (as opposed to the 'General Purpose' DVD-R media which is the consumer standard).
There is another difference between "Authoring" and "Consumer" as well. It has a different
surface coating and is written with a slightly different laser frequency. So you can write a
logically 100% correct DVD with decryption key area, but it won't play in "consumer" players
for physical reasons. Much like CD-RWs don't play in old CD players.
>>So, you heard about Jon Johansen, the Creator of DeCSS?
I was on the livid list immediately after the Declan article came out. It was obvious to everyone at the time that the article was horribly wrong. And yet that is the version that most people heard... BTW. If you haven't read the article then you are too ignorant on the topic to even be talking about decss.
>>So, DeCSS was a clear break of GPL!
Jon said pretty clearly that he got the code from MoRE. As for breaking the GPL, give me a break. A lot of adults don't understand the GPL so I can't fault a 15 year old kid for being confused about it.
People were asking him to release the code and he referred them to an adult because he was afraid of getting arrested. I can't fault a kid for doing that either.
Basically everyone is blaming Jon as a result of that stupid article. He got arrested because of the article. He gets cut down on slashdot for not writing the code that the article said he wrote. I say blame Declan don't blame Jon.
- Insert DVD into Apple standard DVD drive
- Click on DVD icon in Finder
- Select "copy" from the edit menu
- Click in
/Users/davesag/Movies/
- Select "paste" from the edit menu
Lo and behold the whole DVD copies as a 1.7 gb disk image. I can then use the standard DVD player software to play this disk image.How is that done without DeCSS or some equivalent. It worked with 3 DVDs chosen at random from my collection.
There are any number of apps that will convert that disk image to a quicktime or MPEG4 file. Why are they picking on Jon?
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
I asked that back in the 80s. The answer then, as it is now, is -- he's rich. He was born rich, and then, through unethical and legally questionable business practices, became very rich.
Otherwise, I can't see why he wasn't sued for fraud, legal misrepresntation, restraint of trade, and a lot of other things that his company got away with while he was in charge.
He's rich. As a result, he won't be personally sued.
--
AC