A Norwegian who defeated Hollywood on piracy charges pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a landmark appeal hearing that the movie industry is anxious to win to protect its lucrative DVD business.
Prosecutors, on behalf of major U.S. film studios, will try to prove that 20-year-old Jon Johansen broke Norwegian law when he developed and distributed a computer program that enables consumers to make personal copies of their DVDs. The industry hopes to send a message to hackers that it will fight on any turf those who break into their copy-protection systems in a global crackdown on piracy. The plaintiffs, the Motion Picture Association of America-- representing Hollywood studios such as Walt Disney, Universal Studios and Warner Bros.--estimate that piracy costs the U.S. motion picture industry $3 billion annually in lost sales. The case in the Oslo Appeals Court is set to end Dec. 12, and a verdict is expected in early 2004. Johansen was dubbed "DVD-Jon" by the Internet community after he devised a computer program--DeCSS--in the late 1990s that enabled consumers to circumvent copy-protection technology embedded in ordinary DVDs.
An Oslo court cleared Johansen of piracy charges in January after a six-day trial that was billed as a fight between a cyber-David and corporate Goliaths. The court ruled that Johansen could do whatever he wanted to DVDs he had legally purchased. The court also said prosecutors had failed to give evidence that Johansen's program had been used by others to copy and distribute pirated copies. The prosecution this time intends to establish that Johansen broke the law when he cracked the copy-protection code on DVDs. State prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde, who lodged the appeal, objecting to the court's application of the law and the presentation of evidence, said: "The core of this case is the use of DeCSS in connection with legally purchased films...not on pirated copies." Johansen, who developed the program when he was 15, has become a hero for hackers worldwide who say that making software like DeCSS is an act of intellectual freedom.
News source: C|Net News.com
