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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.
Too see how things have changed ;) here are some DVD ripping under Linux guides.. http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Jon Johansen is an evil h4x0r that in one fell swoop allowed socialist Linux and *BSD hippies to watch DVDs on their computers.
If there is any justice, he will be hung from a tall tree in the morning.
Yours truly,
Jack Valenti
Trolling is a art,
I sure feel safer with the deck stacked.
Yes. I realize this is off-topic. Soon it won't be.
...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.
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. .
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
Actually, he was trying to cut down on the Signal/Noise factor in the courtroom. The prosecutor grilled Johansen for hours about "The hacker OS" Linux, what IRC chats he had with the group cracking deCSS, if he had pirated software at home, and so on and so on -not at all realated to the charge.
Manshaus was short and to the point, trying to convey that the court is about one simple thing: Is descrambling your DVD a computer break-in or not? All the hacker-hype from the prosecutor is only there to confuse the judges, by his reasoning.
The way I remember it, Jon was arrested in Norway because the MPAA told the Norwegians he was being a bad boy. Was that a DMCA thing or before that? If it's a DMCA thing, why the fuck is he being tried in Norway, with Norwegian attornies and Judge, for breaking a US law outside the borders of the US?
Jon didn't even give anyone the finger by showing up in the US to deliver a talk about DeCSS, unlike Skylarov and his piece of code.
If the Norwegians caved in because the MPAA threatened them, here's how the conversation should have gone:
MPAA: we want you to prosecute Jon for breaking CSS.
Norway: Fuck off!
MPAA: we'll embargo DVD shipments to Norway!
Norway: Fuck off! We've got diplomats and tourist all over the world that can ship us DVDs.
MPAA:But they won't work in your region coded players!
Norway: Fuck off! We've got Jon-boy and DeCSS...
I mean, if the prosecution has been fiddling and adjusting the charges this much it pretty much says either that
- they don't feel they have precisely focussed their case,
- they didn't understand the technology and are constantly learning more about it
but in either event, their competence is called into question at the very least, or else the motivation for bringing up the charges was not done under the same rigorous way that Norwegian citizens could hope to expect.I hope the jury gets the same sense of shoddiness in the prosecutions case that I'm getting.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
From:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson
CSS was designed with a 40 bit keylength to comply with US government export regulation, and as such it easily compromised through brute force attacks ( such are the intentions of export control ).
Moreover the 40 bits have not been put to good use, as the ciphers succumb to attacks with much lower computational work than which is permitted in the export control rules.
Whether CSS is a serious cryptographic cipher is debatable. It has been clearly been demonstrated that its strength does not match the keylength. If the cipher was intended to get security by remaining secret, this is yet another testament to the fact that security through obscurity is an unworkable principle.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
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.
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."
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
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
There's a nice synopsis about Jon's lies and the "truth" behind DeCSS here. Not what you're talking about, but a very nice corollary.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Uhm, they are playing Calvin Ball in court, actually, I would say that is news...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
The thing that has struck me as absurd about the whole DRM mess, and its DVD-specific issues, is that the proponents of such laws, who undoubtedly think of themselves as capitalists, are acting in a markedly anticapitalist fashion. The end result in this case is a young man being tried for breaking through an informal anticompetitive arrangement between the MPAA on one hand and Microsoft and Apple on the other.
The same is true of region coding: it is a method of creating artificial scarcity, i.e. of anticompetitive market manipulation.
And this, in the end, is what most of the wrangling decried on Slashdot is about -- companies that were formerly highly competitive using their success to suppress competition that might lead to their downfall. Unfortunately, so accustomed are "capitalists" to admiring gigantic corporations that they can, without blinking, swallow the notion that anticompetitive behavior is a form of competition. It is indeed, but only in a political sense, not a market sense, and market competition is what capitalism is about.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.