Posted on 12/16/2002 1:44:19 PM PST by knighthawk
OSLO, Norway (AP) — A Norwegian teenager who wrote software for breaking the copy protection on DVDs harmed movie studios by circulating it over the Internet and should have his computers taken away, prosecutors said Monday.
Prosecutors also called for Jon Leech Johansen, 19, to pay $1,400 in court costs. But they stopped short of seeking jail time, recommending that the teen get a 90-day suspended sentence.
A verdict is expected within a few weeks.
Johansen has said his software, DeCSS, was necessary to watch movies he already owned on his Linux-based computer, for which DVD software had not yet been written. He pleaded innocent last week to charges of violating Norwegian computer security laws, which carry a maximum sentence of 2 years in prison.
Prosecutors said Johansen's intent was to crack the codes for illegal gain and spread the information among Internet hackers.
``Competition was the driving force,'' police prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde said.
Known as ``DVD Jon,'' Johansen has become something of a folk hero to hackers, especially in the United States where a battle is raging over a 1998 copyright law that bans software like DeCSS.
Johansen's attorney, Halvor Manshaus, said Johansen had to copy DVD movies to test the DeCSS software. Manshaus called copying a few bits of DVD data no different from copying parts of an encyclopedia for studying later.
But Sunde said Johansen harmed studios by putting the program online and allowing others to improve methods for cracking the Content Scrambling System, the industry-developed method for protecting DVDs from piracy.
``It's already downloaded by many, and the technical system of safeguards, the Content Scrambling System, is suffering great damage by it,'' Sunde said.
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Which is a good thing, since CSS is a restraint of trade (preventing viewing of DVDs from other countries) and denial of fair use (preventing excerpting and backups).
I agree. Until the movie moguls guarantee to replace at no cost my copy of a movie if it is lost or damaged, I am unsympathetic to them. They are a bunch of fools, like the music industry, who instead of seeing a technology as a brilliant new way to distribute their material with essentially no packaging or shipping costs, they see something which must be crushed. Modern day luddites.
In fairness to the music industry, when my copy of "Les Miserables: Original French Concept Album" got scratched and started skipping (a couple years after I bought it), I was able to get an RMA, return it, and receive a new one at no charge (other than one-way shipping for the original).
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