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Cimarron
Joined: Dec 14, 2002
Posts: 7 (view all)
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Province/State: Florida
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Norwegian Teen's Aquittal to Be Appealed
January 20, 2003 - 08:51 AM
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And we thought it was over!!
DVD Kid's Acquittal to Be Appealed
Mon Jan 20, 1:43 PM ET
By DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer
OSLO, Norway - Norwegian prosecutors will appeal the acquittal of a Norwegian teenager charged with digital burglary for creating and circulating online a program that cracks the security codes on DVDs.
Rune Floisbonn, a prosecutor with Norway's economic crimes police, told the NTB news agency Monday that an appeal would be filed. He did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.
Jon Lech Johansen, 19, was found innocent of violating Norway's data break-in laws Jan. 7 in a ruling that gave prosecutors two weeks to decide whether to appeal the high profile case. That deadline expires Tuesday.
"An appeal was expected," Johansen's attorney, Halvor Manshaus, told AP by telephone. "I haven't gotten it confirmed ... but I believe it is correct and that there will be an appeal."
Floisbonn told Nettavisen, a Norwegian online newspaper, that prosecutors would challenge the Oslo City Court's interpretation of the law and the evidence presented in their case against Johansen.
In its unanimous 25-page ruling, the three-member court found Johansen — known in Norway as DVD-Jon — innocent on all charges.
The ruling was a key test in how far copyright holders can go in preventing duplication of their intellectual property. It said that consumers have rights to view legally obtained DVD films "even if the films are played in a different way than the makers had foreseen."
Johansen, who was 15 when he developed and posted the program on the Internet in late 1999, said he developed the software only to watch movies on a Linux-based computer that lacked DVD-viewing software.
The short program Johansen wrote is just one of many readily available programs that can break the film industry's Content Scrambling System, which prevents illegal copying but also prevents the use of legitimate copies on unauthorized equipment.
Charges against Johansen were filed after Norwegian prosecutors received a complaint from the Motion Picture Association of America and the DVD Copy Control Association, the group that licenses CSS.
The court ruled that Johansen, who works as a programmer in Oslo, could not be convicted of breaking in to DVDs that were his own property, since he had bought them legally.
Manshaus said he did not know when the appeal would be heard.
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