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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?"
beating a dead horse. The RIAA and their possie have enormous patience and wallets. If they don't get what they want this year then they'll do it again next year and so on.
I bet they loose a lot more from making bad movies.
internet like monkeys'
That's a great concept! The idea that he can use what he bought in a fair manner.... this is an interesting concept, one that we should try here in the US! Since he's using it in a manner that is fair to him, we should call it the fair use act! Imagine the possibilities!
"kids -- 30 seconds of joy, 30 years of suffering" -- this kid wrote a few pages worth of code years ago when he was 16. And since then his life has been spent enduring lawsuits by huge industry firms from another country. but that won't keep me from trying to create beauty with code.
Why not go after the ones distributing the illegal media, instead of someone who just made a tool inteded for legal use...?? Its like suing knife makers for being the cause of murders!
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.
Norway is a far cry from the USA, but like EU, we're eagerly learning.
Sadly enough, USA have a big karmic responsibility to the world of being a role-model, and is failing horribly.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Have a look at the way the Norwegian justice system works before you make this kind of comment. The initial trial was in a lower court, both prosecution and defendants may appeal to a higher court.
You may not like it, but this is the way the Norwegian systems works, and has worked for a long time.
So "DVD Jon" is being charged with creating software which allowed the copying of DVD's. So why aren't the people who created VCR's being charged as they allow copying of films as well. Ok so I will say that yes I'm sure this makes pirating a bit easier but if you've ever looked a DeCSS it just providers a framwork that 99.9% of people couldn't use. It wasn't until people starting writing GUI/CLI DVD rippers that it became possible. Should they go after them?
All in all hes been proven innocent once and will be again
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
One thing to keep in mind is that when one is prosecuting a case, either in criminal terms or as a plaintiff, there are usually multiple angles to take when building one's argument. If the prosecutor chooses a different angle of attack in this new trial, it might bring new points that weren't stressed in the previous trial, which gives the defense more challenge in defending. Granted, in theory the bulk of available information should have been put forth in the previous trial, but information or points that the prosecution might have thought unnecessary could be brought to light. In the United States, the prosecution has to outline and show their case on paper before they can even begin to argue it in court, and the defense has to receive all that information, on witnesses and what they're probably going to say, on evidence, etc. I don't know if this is required in Norway or not. If it isn't, and if there are new bits and pieces of information that weren't used before, this could be a very bumpy road for the defense.
It's a damn shame that there isn't a practical way to force the hand of the prosecution. Between his age at the time he wrote DeCSS, the fact that he's already been acquited once, and the fact that this is a completely nonviolent offense that he has been accused of, I'd imagine that Norway's court would have a lot more important, and more success-likely cases to prosecute. Cases like murder, rape, even theft that are pushed back because of the state appeal of a case they already lost against a minor who simply wanted to use his computer as the new-age equivalent of a VCR, and enable others to do the same.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I don't think that Hollywood and the movie studios care so much about the outcome of the trial as long as the process is scaring the shit out of other potential code writers.
The goal of the process is not "justice" (Whatever that word means in the US of A) but to make an example out of John. "Hey, if you mess with us we will keep you tied up in legal problems for 10 years, guilty or not!"
The whole thing isn't exactly giving a good image of the USA as the "land of the free and brave" but rather something like the "rich and blinded by power".
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
1) Smith&Wesson, Colt, Heckler&Koch all have products that enable, for example, car-jacking, armed robbery and murder.
2) GM, Ford have products that enable many people to commit actual crimes and subsequently escape into other jurisdictions.
3) Numerous beer, wine and liquor manufacturers have products that cause many deaths, often when combined with items 1 & 2 listed above.
Call it flamebait, or troll if you like, I don't care. No, the above don't relate to the DMCA - so what? They're just as ridiculous as retrying someone who was acquitted, and that's all my examples are intended to show.
Jon was acquitted - what on earth could the MPAA produce as evidence that wasn't produced last time around? Not much, I suspect. If a firearms manufacturer can say "we just produce guns, we don't kill people with them" and get away with it, why can't Jon say "I'm legally watching DVDs I already own" and be safe from this modern Inquisition? I sincerely hope that the Norwegian courts are able to hand off Jon's defence expenses to the MPAA. If not, he should be considering suing the MPAA for libel, slander, defamation of character, loss of earnings, etc.
This post is a comment on the stupidity of the DMCA and the MPAA and has nothing to do the Gulf War or gun control. (In case you're interested, I firmly believe that gun control means hitting your intended target first time, not squeezing off a few rounds and calling whatever you hit the target...)
The problem with hollywood's "we're losing 3 billion annually" numbers is that they are taking an estimated number of copies made each year at a price of FREE and multiplying it by the price they charge for DVDs. If they took an economics course they would realize that the demand for a movie is very elastic, meaning as the price goes up the number of movies purchased goes down. At a price of essentially zero the demand for every movie is HUGE, thus there are hundreds of thousands of downloads. If it actually cost the retail price of the DVD to download the movie then downloads would significantly drop. To find the actual amount that downloading DVDs costs hollywood you have to shift the demand curve along the supply curve until you hit the price of the retail DVDs and then you have the real number of lost DVD sales, which would be significantly less than 3 billion dollars a year because the demand for DVDs is most likely very elastic (help me out here any of you people who actually have an economics degree, what do you think the actual cost to Hollywood is? Is the demand elastic?)
However, there are people and societies that believe removing criminals from the streets is better for the greater good of the community and outweighs the dangers of innocent people being affected by their methods.
There are several logical extensions to this statement, which explain why the American legal system is (theoretically) so protective of the defendant.
First of all, the desire to see justice done often leads people to treat the law as an agent of retribution rather than of justice. Whenever a suspected murderer is acquitted, the news story includes an obligatory statement from the family saying how disappointed they are. In some cases the defendant really is quite innocent, or prosecutorial abuse of the legal system was far out of bounds.
This means that when popular attention fixes on one suspect any concept of legal "fairness" goes out the window. The need for someone to blame and punish leads to lynching by jury. Typically the poor (and/or minorities, uneducated, etc.) get hit hardest by this. They're the easiest to pick on, and the easiest to abuse in court or interrogation. By the way, 38 black residents of Tulia, TX were just freed on the basis that the entire case against them was almost certainly fabricated.
Some people would take this to extremes and seriously argue that the application of the death penalty to innocents is worth having it as a deterrent. (I'm not joking - a National Review columnist once said this, and I've heard it elsewhere.)
You have to understand that the enemy isn't necessarily the government - it's the people. Read up on the history of lynching in the South. I think the problems we're seeing with crime enforcement in general and the death penalty in particular stem from similar factors - not necessarily racism per se, but scapegoating and the violent expression of popular anger. No one cares if some poor, retarded man fries, and doesn't even bother to think about his innocence, because they're convinced (reasonably so) that it'll never happen to them.
America's system clearly isn't perfect; the legal protections defendants enjoy have not prevented many people being railroaded into long prison sentences or execution. I'd argue that we should abolish the death penalty entirely, for that matter. 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.
Does your respect for the diversity of legal systems extend to the sharia court in Nigeria that's planning to stone a woman for adultery?
OK.Jon Johansen made the GUI + some subsystem to break the CSS DVD encryption. Mind you, he got these codes from a German fellow, he did not get the codes himself.
In current Norwegian copyright law, you are entitled to make a copy of a copyrighted work for personal use (Åndsverkloven 12, 1st section. This does not apply to computer programs or databases.). Jons program does not facilitate the copying of the DVD, just the reading the contents. He also argued that DeCSS could be used for making backups of the DVD.
Jon argues that he made DeCSS to view the contents of the DVD on this Linux computer. The prosecution argues that he mocks Linux and was a BSD-guy at the time of DeCSS. Anyway, the DeCSS program first appeared on Windows.
The prosecution wanted to nail Jon on the paragraph 145 of the Norwegian penal code. It says that (summary) "anyone gaining illegal access to locked data, also computer data can be punished with jail for a maximum of six months". Note the "illegal" part here. The judge ruled that Jon had only gained access with DeCSS to data HE had bought. It was his copy of the work in question so he had a right to access it. He did not distribute any illegal copies, and he did not gain unlawful access to the DVD although his program might be used for that.
Disclaimer: IAANLS (I am a Norwegian law student)
While I am of two minds on the gun-control debate, this snippet of text caught my eye. It's important to realize that our founders considered this one of the MOST BASIC rights that must be guaranteed.
Specifically, they wanted to ensure that the public had the means necessary to overthrow the government established by the Constitution, in the event that it didn't work out as they had hoped. If, for instance, the democratic process was subverted in some way, We The People were expected to take up our arms and restore proper government.
The fact that such a provision is essentially meaningless in an era of billion dollar war machines is a topic for another debate. If only Ben Franklin were still around to help us out with thorny issues like this... *sigh*
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I don't know about anyone else, but when I read stories about retrials after acquittals, it makes me REALLY glad the U.S. Constitution prohibits Double Jeopardy (and not the round in the television show either).
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.