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Jon Johansen To Be Retried On Piracy Charges
cecil36 writes "Yahoo has the scoop on 'DVD Jon's' latest trial regarding DeCSS being used as a piracy tool. The article claims that Hollywood is losing $3 billion a year due to piracy *yawn*, but Johansen's lawyer believes the acquittal from the previous trial may be enough for him to win the case. The case is set to go again on December 2nd this year. What are the prospects of Johansen winning a second time?"
Since 9/11 there seems to be a growing desire by governments to abolish double jeopardy - the idea that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. One way around it is that many countries now have so many statutes that one action can be held to break several different laws - so they can try one thing and then if it doesn't work, try another until they get you. We possibly shouldn't be surprised that Norway is one of them: underneath the clean and friendly image, Scandinavian states have a history of social control, significant right-wing politics, and social repression of dissident groups. Just like us, in fact.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
How about ex post facto applying for this case. If the ruling body had made the law that they want to try Jon under _after_ DeCSS was written, it stands to reason that the law should not be able to apply to him.
Well, IANAL, (definitely IANANL), but IWLOF (I Watch Law and Order Frequently).
It's not a 'new trial', but a 'retrial'. Just as the defendant can appeal to a higher court, so can the prosecutors. Mind you, had the defendant appealed, it would have been more or less automaticly accepted, the prosecution must prove that something was wrong with the forst trial; that the judge used the law wrong, that evidence was overlooked or that there was some technicaly that wasn't right.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I bet there won't ever be a movie released about "The DVD Jon Trials"... At least not on DVD.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
This isn't a retrial, it's an appeal. It does make it suck considerably less than if it had been a retrial.
"What stops analog copying?"
...the region codes supposedly stop that from happening, given that most of the large scale piracy actually occurs in China, and no one would ever think to bring a Region 1 or a region-free DVD player into China, and none of those DVD's could ever make it back to the U.S., right?
In theory, your DVD player adds MacroVision(tm) to the signal.
But MPAA really do not care about analog redistribution, per se, because it's not an issue for them: it doesn't scale to 10,000 copies very easily, like dumping a DeCSS'ed data stream onto Internet II.
What they are more worried about is digital duplication of perfect copies over communications networks, both todays, and those just over the horizon.
At some point, the DVD-R/DVD-RW technology will get to where it can make a verbatim copy of a still-protected DVD, and the game will be up for them, since people will just copy verbatim images of the CSS'ed DVD's themselves.
In fact, you could just send the raw DVD data over a network to a remote site *now*, and burn a copy, and to heck with the idea of CSS anyway: a bit-for-bit copy is identical: let your DVD player DeCSS the contents for you with legal chips.
Then
-- Terry
First, even IF he gets convicted, the case will have absolutely no bearing on any federal or state law in the United States. No court in this country will recognize Norwegian law.
Second, though I know little about the Norwegian court system, an appeal usually focuses primarily on whether or not the law was correctly applied in the previous case. If that's how things work over there, there's a good chance the ruling will uphold the judgment of the lower court.
Third, if my experiences in US Courts are any guide, foreign companies/corporations/groups tend not to fare so well against a local defendant.
I might be totally wrong about those last two points, but I hope everyone in the US doesn't freak out too much. It's not going to have any bearing on what happens here. And beside the point, the genie (DeCSS) is already out of the bottle. They're just trying to frighten people out of using it.
IAAL
(Then again, on the earlier example -- while it's true that guns don't kill people, trigger fingers don't fire bullets...)
Breakfast served all day!
Add to that that considerable weight will be given by the court to the judgement from the lower court, and the party who lost in the lower court starts at a significant disadvantage in the appeal court.
The Norwegian legal system is quite different from the american. Suing for malicious use of the court system has to be very, very well founded in the charges brought agains Jon. In this case the prosecutor (Økokrim) has a duty to intercept and investigate. After all,Jon HAS done something that comes quite close to breaking the law. So the Økokrim is in their right.
As for retriution, he can sue for money lost due to the case and a small ammount of money for damages. As a rule, in the courts of Norway, penal money retributions does not exist.
Disclaimer: IAANLS (I am a Norwegian law student)
Jon has used his fme for everything it is worth. I would say that he was very dumb-headed to go public with the little GUI he made for the DeCSS at an early time. Furthermore, when the Economical Crimes Division in Norway (Økokrim) got interested, he did not erase chat-logs or dispose of his (In Norwegian copyright law) illegal CD-ROM copies of Macromedi Flash or something.
.com company that hired him went belly-up and now he works for some third-rate .com .
Well, he got a job as a result of the fame so he quit school in an age of 16 (The earliest age where you can quit school legally in Norway). The
Lesson (In mr. T-voice): Don't be a fool, stay in school!
DeCSS isn't a piracy tool. It is a tool that can be used to watch DVDs on a computer that has DVD hardware but not licensed DVD software. It doesn't make piracy any more or less doable and most likely isn't involved in any large scale piracy operation.
DeCSS does mean that the license that companies pay for using the DVD decrypt doesn't have to be purchased at all. So that people that created and control the DVD encrypt/decrypt system might not have complete control of DVDs and might not get paid for every player sold.
The modelling would be pretty complex - but it has been tried, though not, to my recollection, with DVD's in particular. Remember when Amazon kept offering different prices to different consumers for the same item? That kind of "NOW how much will you pay?" analysis would have to be done a few different ways, I would think, to get to the "real" price (equilibrium state btw supply and demand). However, I think the markup on DVD's is so thin (e.g., Costco wholesale is pennies different than mainline retail) that such research would be difficult unless the MPAA were willing to spend money to get real figures, which obviously is counter to their interests.
Another thing to remember is that the elasticity of these demand curves (i.e., their slope) changes over time. New releases can tap pent-up demand at any reasonable price; as the release ages the curve flattens very quickly. The market becomes saturated, demand is exhausted, and the property is sold to the cable networks to squeeze the last bit of revenue out of the equation.
To make a short story long... I don't believe that there exists a fixed point in time where we can compare pre-DeCSS piracy to post-DeCSS piracy. As piracy technology evolved and spread, so too did the usage of consumer DVD players (now less than $50 USD at the grocery store down the street - now THAT's a saturated market at work). The upshot is that we could develop a model to assess the true "lost revenue," but the people holding access to the data needed to develop the model are those least interested in getting a real number. It's much easier to get headlines with your pinkie finger stuck to your lip screaming "3 BILLION dollars!" than to show the slowing of growth in sales of DVD's. Look at the cinema industry here in the US; three years ago the major players were merging like crazy and building new movie theaters anywhere they could get a lease - we still haven't cleared this glut of capacity and these companies are on shaky ground despite this lousy commercial real estate market. But we're supposed to believe that DVD sales will grow at x% (where x is a very large number) when the first-run movie houses can't pay their bills?
Why not go after the ones distributing the illegal media, instead of someone who just made a tool inteded for legal use
Because piracy doesn't scare Hollywood/the record industry. Piracy is a known quantity, and is figured in as a business risk.
The prospect of legitimate users circumventing every new scheme for boosting revenue through restricted use of media is terrifying to these people! The idea that a new technology offers the chance to essentially print money, and then some f'r'ner comes by and makes it possible for the marks to take back control.... That's worthy of massive action, because the rewards if they win are far more massive than stopping piracy (which is not a barrier to *any* business model, just a small drain on revenue which would probably never have been realized anyway).