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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?"
Just set the evil bit for any content decoded by DeCSS.
DeCSS is a terrorist tool and should be stopped. We cannot allow people to terrorize the MPAA members (who are all poor and starving) like this.
Go get em PATRIOT act, watching Men In Black II without paying for it or ever having intention of paying for it in the first place is a serious crime. (to yourself! ever SEEN that POS?)
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...
What does he expect. If you go sailing around the carribean, stealing gold from the spaniards while waving a cutlass and crying "shiver me timbers", you can expect the authorities to try you on piracy charges. The sooner we send this scourge of the seaways to Davy Jones' locker, the better. Hang him from the yard arm, I say!
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
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?)
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
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?
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.