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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?"
Social control - yes
Right-wing politics - hell no! Socialist influences more like.
Repression of dissident groups - no again
in GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUSegmentation fault
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.
This isn't a retrial, it's an appeal. It does make it suck considerably less than if it had been a retrial.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, I'll bring out again that Norway does have something similar to US double jeopardy protection, however the protection is against retrial, not appeal. This is what is normal in legal systems not based on English common law. Appeals in Norway always happen to a higher court, and there are only three levels in the court system. The Supreme Court refuses most request for appeals, and the next level down usually only hear complaints about procedure or application of law and usually put substantial weight on the evidence and findings of the lower court.
As such, the burden of an appeals case is significantly lower than it would have been in a retrial. It's certainly not non-existant, but it's still lower.
Generally, though, looking at prison population in percentage of population compared to reported crime, it would seem that the Norwegian legal system is far less likely to convict you of anything. Add to that that Norwegian law imposes a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison followed by up to 10 years of regular check ins with the police, a sentence which is usually only used for multiple homicide cases or similar extensive violent crimes. And most crimes have legal maximum sentences that are much, much lower.
What you're left with is a legal system that I'd argue places lower burdens on a defendant overall: You may find that an aquittal get appealed, but you risk less (a significantly lower sentence, and significantly better conditions in prison), and it will likely take more to get a conviction even in the lower court.
Our right wing parties always complain about this, and want our legal system to become more like the US legal system in order to put more people behind bars... In Norway wanting to be "tough on crime" translates directly into wanting to copy the US.
Your point about Nigeria is good, but I'd like to point out there that the Sharia courts point to significant ethnic problems in Nigeria, which is divided pretty evenly between christians and muslims. Sharia courts in the muslim north only apply to muslims. Even so, the federal legal system has made it clear that it considers much of Sharia law to violate federal law, and the federal government has made it clear that anyone sentenced under Sharia law to a punishment not supported by the federal legal system can appeal and expect their sentences to be overturned more or less automatically in the higher court.
The problem faced by Obasanjo (the Nigerian president), though, is that Nigeria is just a few years away from it last period of military dictatorship, ethnic problems have caused significant clashes in the north (between christians and muslims), and ethnic unrest in the south west has placed a large part of Nigeria's oil production in jeopardy, while corruption is still widespread. In a situation like that, he hardly have the power base to address the problem of the Sharia courts - in the last election, the muslim north was an important area for him (despite being christian himself).
Obviously none of that diminish the problem of the sharia courts, but it should give some insight in why they're tolerated - the federal government is still way to weak to take the chance of another uprising or military coup.
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.
However, I have no respect for any legal system that places defendants at the mercy of overzealous prosecutors driven by either corporate cartels or popular sentiment. I have no opinion on Norway's society or government in general, but I can still say their legal rules suck fat cock.
Please do some more reading: In all criminal cases in Norway, the government has to pick up the defendant's legal costs, irrespective of which lawyer he chooses to represent himself.
This means that even in an obviously lopsided case like this (really the MPAA vs Jon J), the stronger party cannot add cripling economic burdens on top of the onus of being forced to show up in court.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
The Supreme Court refuses most request for appeals, and the next level down usually only hear complaints about procedure or application of law and usually put substantial weight on the evidence and findings of the lower court.
...
In this particular case the proceedings of the lower court (the Tingrett) were audiotaped - I don't know whether the video feed into the press room was also taped.
The verdict (in Norwegian) says quite
clearly that Johansen had done almost exactly what the prosecution claimed he had - but that this was not a crime according to Norwegian law.
I have big problems seeing how the appeals court (lagmannsretten) could twist the law to make it a crime. On the other hand, it's a jury court, and if the prosecution experts can manage to brainwash the lay people on the bench
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.
Not with a "normal" DVD burner: they can't write the keys to the appropriate track, it seems. The CSS keys are stored in a special area, which cannot even be read with normal DVD drives directly: you have to go through a cryptographic dance with the hardware (css_auth) before you can read that track. Consumer-type DVD recorders cannot write to that track, and ISTR it's not writable on standard blanks either - you need a special "mastering" recorder and blank. Since those recorders are aimed at movie studios, and priced accordingly, with the blanks costing more than pre-recorded DVDs, that idea is pretty much a non-starter for piracy: it's cheaper to buy legit copies in a store!
Then ...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?
Region coding does strike me as pretty dumb. Apart from the extra costs - instead of making one "English" version, to sell in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland, you have to make and distribute "North America - English" (US/Canada), "Europe - English" (UK/Ireland), "Asia/Pacific - English" (NZ/Australia)...
(Thanks to national censorship, you have to make separate UK versions anyway, with modified artwork to feature the government's censor-approval certificate, but hopefully that will die soon.)