Yeah! That’s justice being served twice in a row!
(The ElcomSoft verdict being the first time!)
Norwegian Teen Acquitted of DVD Piracy

“I’m very satisfied,” he said after Sogn read the ruling. “We won support on all points. I had figured that we could win, but it can go either way.”
The prosecution, which had called for a 90-day suspended jail sentence, confiscation of computer equipment and court costs, said it would decide in the next two weeks whether to appeal.
Johansen said he expects another round because this is the first such case in Norway.
“But clearly, winning the first round means a lot,” Johansen said.
The ruling found that consumers have rights to legally obtained DVD films “even if the films are played in a different way than the makers had foreseen.”
Johansen said that was key.
“As long as you have purchased a DVD legally, then you are allowed to decode it with any equipment and can’t be forced to buy any specific equipment,” he said.

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Hey sorry I’ve been amiss in keeping this category up-to-date with the trial going on this week — I’ve been covering the ElcomSoft Trial at the same time and it’s getting pretty hairy keeping up with everything.
Here’s a first hand account of the trial from Edward Welbourne via Declan’s Politech.

Given that Økokrim confiscated everything in his home,
at the time, to hunt for pirated DVDs – without success,
not even copies of the DVDs he owns, which he’s
*entitled* to copy – it’s going to be fairly easy for
the defense to argue that what Jon wanted DeCSS
for was – shock, horror- in order to view DVDs
lawfully in his possession. The prosecutor even
made a big deal of bits of the DeCSS distribution
saying “this is only a decryptor” and how copying
the .vob files off the DVD itself was a separate
operation for which the user didn’t need anything
special. I was somewhat at a loss to see how this
was meant to help her case …
Other folk I spoke to in recesses said that they
thought the prosecutor was mainly aiming to
portray Jon in a bad light, rather than actually
showing any wrong-doing. Apparently she
described the open-source hackers working
on a DVD player as a criminal gang. There
were quotes from some IRC groups frequented
by copyright violators, including someone in one
group outright describing the group as a bunch of
criminals and telling Jon to go away because
he didn’t want to hang with a bunch of criminals.
It’s hard to see how they expect to dirty his
name with the news that he quit that forum once
this was made plain to him …

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Jon Johansen’s trial has been rescheduled to December 9, 2002 so that a technically-savvy judge can be located for the trial (hey! there’s an idea 🙂
Read more about it (along with a note frooom Jon explaining that he didn’t even write the particular piece of code in question on
Greplaw.
Here’s the EFF’s Jon Johansen Information Website for more information about the details of the case.

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