Prosecutors Try Again for Norwegian DVD Jon

By Jay Lyman
TechNewsWorld
December 2, 2003

Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice and among those supporting Johansen and his acquittal, said an overturn of the earlier ruling would make it illegal for Norwegians to circumvent digital controls on their own property.

A Norwegian court is again hearing the case of prominent cracker Jon Johansen, known as DVD Jon for his 1999 software program that circumvents DVD copy protection, the publication of which launched a swarm of lawsuits against Web publishers, including hacker site 2600.com.
While a three-judge panel in January rejected charges that Johansen had illegally accessed his DVD movies using his own Linux-based player, Norwegian law allows the prosecution to appeal a case. Since coming up with the DVD crack DeCSS program in 1999 at the age of 15, Johansen more recently published a new computer program called QTFairUse that allows users to copy Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes collections by opening the music files and saving them without copyright protection.

Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Wendy Seltzer told TechNewsWorld that the final outcome of both the Norwegian case and a related U.S. case involving the Internet posting of the DeCSS code (Copy Control Association v. Andrew Bunner) hinge on whether the widely published software program violates a trade secret.
Basically, once the information is so widely spread, the court won't protect it as secret as it once was, Seltzer said of the California State Supreme Court ruling in the Bunner case.






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