Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Jon Johansen Trial Continues

Posted by michael on from the grinding-grinding dept.

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.

7 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Uhh...Umm...Ano... by chas.capwell · · Score: 5, Interesting
    You can change the charges in mid trial? Smells like BS. I can't quite place why. But it smells fowl.

    Um, maybe because the trial isn't held in the U.S.? Just because something can't be done in the U.S. legal system doesn't mean it can't be done in another country.

    While I find the idea of being able to change charges in mid-stream a little. . .slimy, it's their court of law. 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 /.ers for Norway care to comment?
  2. Re:What's up with the defense? by RickHunter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. CSS vs. CSS by k-hell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum] by KjetilK · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum] by css-truth · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A different viewpoint


    I read through a lot of the list and several things struck me. Overall,
    I see the list as lending a lot of credibility to Johansen's case. I
    don't see it casting doubt as to this.

    Overall, I think the livid-dev mailing list shows Johansen was trying
    to contribute to Linux (and FreeBSD) and shared code with Derek Fawcus
    as a liason to bring this about. He clearly believed _before_ he was
    arrested that his actions were consistent with the DMCA and measured
    them carefully.
  6. Re:Don't need deCSS to pirate DVDs? by bmwm3nut · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  7. Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum] by Error27 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    >>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.