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DeCSS: Jon Johansen Retrial Begins
JPMH writes "Jon Johansen is back on trial for DeCSS. Despite the acquittal back in January, the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (OKOKRIM) is allowed to bring his case back before an enlarged panel of judges. The retrial begins today."
So, let me get this straight : a guy does something that raises suspicion and gets a trial.
He's found innocent.
So, he's being tried again... and again ?
Why don't they directly send him to the electric chair ?
After all : they won't stop until he's found guilty, will they ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I didn't know that Hollywood, USA had the legal authority to put Norweigans thru a retrial after an acquittal. What next, will Jon be tried as a terrorist?
If it wasn't for Jon, I wouldn't have 60+ DVDs at home and the movie industry wouldn't have 900 of my hard earned cash.
I don't have a DVD player, I dont run windows. If it wasn't for Jon and the fine guys at Ogle, Mplayer, Xine, etc I wouldn't buy DVDs.
The movie industry needs locking up in a cell with a 7 foot guy called Buba wearing a dress. Pricks!
Oh no? What about O.J.? Same crime, two different courts (criminal vs. civil). Is this the same kind of situation?
DeCSS2 will be created just like DeCSS was, but instead of one "Jon Johansen" its creator's name will most likely sound like "d00d" or "DaMan".
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Again, civilized countries don't let the government appeal an acquittal, which is precisely what's happening here.
no offense, but i doubt the suits care - you represent such a very tiny % of the market for their products.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
Before we all get all tear-eyed with nationalistic ideals etc etc, we should remember where RIAA and MPAA comes from.
(I am not a lawyer, of course, but...)
You certainly CAN be tried for the same crime twice. You cannot, however, be tried on the same charge. Not to mention, you can be tried in criminal court, and then again in civil court, a la OJ Simpson.
No, admittedly, it's not likely that the Justice system - if you call it that - would try you for manslaughter after finding you "not guilty" of murder, but you CAN be found guilty of one infrigement and not of another - for the same crime.
No, OJ dis not face criminal prosecution twice for the same crime. The key is the governments ability to restrict or revoke an individual's liberties.
Both trials were a farce. The criminal trial demonstrated how flawed the legal system is. A jury of your peers has turned into a jury of the uneducated and unemployed who understand neither the legal system nor the law, much less the simple physics of everyday life. The civil trial demostrated the inequity of the legal system. If OJ had been a penniless street kid he wouldn't have gotten sued. He had money, and the family decided to punish him financially via the courts. OF course, as a penniless street kid, he would have hanged after his court appointed attorney slept through most of the trial.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The wording here is misleading. He's not really being tried in the same court...if I had to compare it to something most of us would know, it would be the US Supreme Court. You can start small and work your way up through the system, this is what has happened with his case.
What we have now, that we didn't have much of before was derivative works. Just who is using DeCSS? There are certainly a lot of DVD players for Linux that use the libraries to play encrypted DVDs...But on the other hand, every DVD ripper that uses DeCSS code is going to hurt his case.
...for fighting the good fight.
He's a bright kid (in the computer sense), and yet - apparently - stupid enough to pick on a 600 pound gorilla (RIAA/MPAA). I suppose the only thing to say is, "Thank you." Even US corporations with fat legal warchests aren't willing to take such a chance. Every revolution must start somewhere, and most truly successful ones start at the bottom.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Most civilized countries have also abolished the death penalty.
Yeah - be happy!; in the US only 10% of the cases gets to a trial at all; the other 90% is blackmailed and never sees a judge. In Norwich on the other hand all suspects get a chance to be judged by the judge and after that both parties get a second chance to be judged by a higher judge. Now which of those systems do you prefer?
0x or or snor perron?!
Nothing like companies/industries not wanting their products to be sold.
It makes absolutely no sense why the RIAA would give a damn about DeCSS - it enables people to watch their over-priced DVDs in foreign countries. This requires at least some purchase. What's the deal?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"This is to protect citizens against the possibility of being harassed until they go bankrupt or are found guilty."
Except, in scandinavian countries (which have very similar legal systems) there is no reason to go bankrupt in a criminal case. Your legal advise is payed by the government anyway. To claim that all civilized legal systems must build on the same principles as the US is, to put it mildly, stupid.
There are good reasons for the prosecutor to be able to appeal. A higher court is normally more competent than a lower one. Personally I don't like a system where the only way to have a supreme court ruling is with convictions in lower courts. This creates incentives for lower courts to convict, just to have the case tested.
"There is no reason to prevent the government from retrying their case once or twice."
There are very good reasons: for example, historically juries in civilised nations have routinely refused to convict people for breaking unpopular laws, effectively providing direct democracy in the jury box. Since the prosecutor can't get a retrial, that person is now free.
This is why Prohibition was finally ended in America: it simply became too difficult for the cops to get anyone convicted. In Europe, they would have been tried by judges, found guilty by the government, and the law would still stand.
"In theory, due to your double jeopardy laws, if the accused is guilty and aquitted - he may walk out of the courtroom and then tell the press "They released me, but really - I did do it! Ha! Ha!""
Indeed they could. Which is far better than an innocent person being persecuted by the government with repeated retrials... particularly if that "guilty" person was breaking some bogus law that 90% of the population oppose.
See, this is the difference between the civlised, "innocent until proven guilty" nations and the authoritarian "guilty until proven innocent" nations. As bad as some abuses have been in Britain and America, we've never started World Wars or slaughtered millions of our own people: there are good reasons for that, and our long-standing fear of giving people uncontrolled power is the largest one.
No, different in every case.
OJ was tried in a crinimal court of law and found not guilty based on the evidence. HE was then pursued in a civil court of law and was found to be responsable for the deaths, regardless of not being guilty of the deaths. There is a difference, someone can be found responsable for something without actually doing it.
The bit that most people leave out here is that OJ appealed the responsable verdict and it was found in his favour, so essentially he came out of the whole ordeal with nothing against him, except now his reputation was in tatters.
In some European legal systems, you have a tier of courts. In the UK this goes from your local magistrate, all the way up to the House of Lords (yes, one part of our government actually takes part in the legal process), and increasingly, the Euorpean Court of Human Rights. Either party can apply to the court above the one that returned the verdict for leave to appeal, which basically means you move up a stage in the courts to a court which has more standing. That court can either grant your application for an appeal, or turn it down. If you get it turned down, you have one more chance to have that decision overturned, if not then the last verdict returned stands.
The Double Jepordy stands if the above process has been exhausted and the defendant is still found not guilty. He cannot be arrested and charged with the same crime for successive times, even if compelling new evidence has been discovered. This is about to change in the UK, as the current government is introducing legislation which will allow a person to be tried for a crime multiple times if compelling new evidence is discovered.
From what I know, the Norwedgen legal system is much like the UKs, with tiers of courts, each having more standing than the one below. A verdict can be appealed to the court above, basically in the hope that that court may have different ideas, or understand the situation better. Indeed, some cases are passed up the chain voluntarily by lesser courts who deem themselves to not have enough legal standing to deal with the situations that arise.
The lack of a decent public defender system in the US makes it more or less essential to spend money on a private defense if at all possible, while you have very good chance of getting a top notch lawyer (from a private law firm) assigned to you as a public defender in Norway and may face much less financial problems as a result.
Combine that with MUCH longer sentences in the US, and things start getting interesting (Norway has a MAXIMUM sentence of 21 years + 10 years of reporting regularly to the police, a sentence that is only rarely handed down, and then usually to multiple murderers, and normally you would be eligible for, and get, parole after serving 2/3rds of the sentence).
No person shall [..] be deprived of life, LIBERTY, or property, without due process of law;
So, what about all those folks in Guantanamo bay?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
"Oh my $DEITY..... they're trying to make fast-forwarding past advertisements illegal?!? "
It is already illegal in the U.S. The ads autoplay, and you cannot stop them. Unless, of course, you reverse engineer a DVD player that lets you control whatever you like -- which is illegal under the DMCA. It is illegal to attempt to bypass an encrypted system, however they care to define it. it Even ROT13 qualifies as encryption, so the vendors don't even have to try very hard.
145.2 of the Norweigan criminal statute "which outlaws bypassing technological restrictions to access data that one is not entitled to access."
If Johansen has only used it to access DVDs he has bought and paid for, then he does have an entitlement to access them.
There are a few differences between the legal systems that are important to consider, though: In Norway you don't rack up the enormous expenses in lawyer costs. If you are accused of a crime, the State cover the costs for a lawyer of your choice. In civil suits, the losing party will often have to pay the winner's costs, so frivolous law suits by deep-pocketed corporations looking for a settlement are few and far between. Lawyers are also not allowed no-cure-no-pay fee structures, meaning that you don't get those idiotic class action suits.
That being said, the consensus among people with technical and legal background here in Norway is that Jon will get off, but that the case is being driven upwards in the court system precisely to get a thorough vetting. It should be noted that if Jon should be found guilty, he will face much more lenient sentencing than would be handed out in the States, and the MPAA/RIAA would not even get a hearing with speculations about millions of dollars lost because of DeCSS (and anyway, Jon could easily appeal to the Supreme Court.)
Incidentally, Okokrim has been roundly criticized for even bringing this suit by almost all commentators - and I have a sneaking suspicion they don't even believe in it themselves, and are seeking a precedent judgement so as to know where they can draw the line in the future.
IANAL, but I am not that worried - what we have here is a reasonably thorough process to settle a question of criminality of a legal question that is rather new. It will work itself out, probably with Jon being found innocent, setting a precedent which will be appealed to the Supreme court by Okokrim. And I think the Supreme court will refuse to hear the appeal, thus confirming the precedent.
Espen
He was like 14 or 15 when he released DeCSS and it wasn't even illegal in his country at the time.
this is totally stupid. it seems like anybody who tries to do something really new and cool ends up with litigation against them. I'm trying to make a nice open source MMORPG, but what happens when i release it and it eats business from eversmack, will i get sued?? If i were Johansen i'd have never dreamed of publishing anything i wrote ever again, id be too scared! i admire his bravery in the face of all this unfounded legal BS!!
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
...I got locked out of my house and was arrested for breaking into my own home.
Until DMCA and it's counterparts elsewhere go away, we are all at the mercy of the **AA overlords and lackeys.
--
Free beer is nice, but I can speak more freely if I buy the beer.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
If the product were extremely critical-- say, a life and death sort of thing like a pacemaker-- I would reject it if it failed even one test. And that would be good practice. You propose to retest it again and again until you get the result you want. Try explaining your rationale to the family of the the person who dies because you were trying to be "reasonable" in your testing, rather than stringent.
A higher court, with more/better educated judges
In the Norwegian system, it's possible to be acquitted by no less than two different courts before some third set of judges decides to jail you. If you believe that the third set is somehow "better" than the lower courts, then you're implicitly casting the other two sets of judges as wrong or even incompetent in those cases (perhaps because they're under-educated?) You're admitting that most of the legal decisions in your country are being made by judges who are periodically (nay, regularly) in error. That's a legal system I'd love to be subject to.
Inger Marie Sunde, the good aturney,
had a bit of a problem in court today when she didnt know what a algorithm was.
the mos central word in this case,m an she dont know what it mean.
We are realy loving her in norway.
here is a part of the propersition for punischment
"a pentium3 500MHz pc-case" ok she only want the case not the parts within
And that did a whole lot of justice in the case of people like O.J. Simpson.
I wouldn't knock the Norweigan system just because its not like ours. Our country isn't exactly a pinnacle of legal fairness, you know.
Its a Micky Mouse court under layered by freedom restricting laws that serve only corporate interests. If the MPAA stopped making films today for example it would not matter there would be people who would make better films for less, just as if Microsoft stopped what they were doing, (well,people already make better software for less). What public interest do laws like the DMCA serve? I've never seen a real criminal busted by the DMCA, in fact "arrested under DMCA" would probably boost my trust for someone (if i were an employer i would hire them on the spot)
Then theres the inability for the court members to fully understand the situation. All they see is "this law says you cant do this because it violates this companies IP security, this kid has broken the law" which is the same thing the politicians see. What the people in charge don't see or understand is the free speech issue and all they listen to are well trained, well articulated expensive company lawyers who know exactly how to sell the case just like the salesperson at that electronics store knows exactly how to sell your parents the wrong thing. Law and politics shouldn't be like that, otherwise the whole system is useless.
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