Norwegian teen
raided by police in DVD suit
January 25, 2000
CNN ©
Web posted at: 4:23 p.m. EST (2123 GMT)
From staff reports
(CNN) -- Police on Monday raided the home of
Jon Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who reverse-engineered
the DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS) to allow DVD playback
on computers running the Linux operating system.
His DeCSS software breaks the encoding
system in DVDs, and is the subject of several lawsuits in the
United States against people who have posted or linked to the
file or source code.
Entertainment industry giants including
Sony, Universal, MGM and Warner Bros. have filed a complaint
against 16-year-old Johansen, accusing him of cracking the
codes meant to protect their products from downloading.
Warner Bros. is a part of Time Warner Inc.,
which owns CNN.com.
Norwegian state prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde
says the Norwegian police are taking the matter very
seriously.
"It is a huge problem for those who
produce copyrighted material to protect their interests when
it is distributed over the Internet. At the same time we want
to crack down on the hero worship of the hackers. Even though
the accused is only 16 years old, he seems to be aware of what
he has done," Sunde says.
The copyright infringement charges against
Johansen carry fines and prison terms of up to two years in
Norway. Johansen was taken in for questioning and released.
"They claim we have broken the
copyright protection which makes it possible to copy DVD
movies. This is totally wrong. We can prove this in court if
necessary," Johansen said to CNN Norge.
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| Jon Johansen |
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"I made this program to be able to view
DVD on my Linux," claims Johansen. "This way, the
film industry no longer has a monopoly making DVD
players."
The Norwegian police also charged Johansen's
father with copyright infringement, for operating the mmadb.no
domain where his son originally posted the program. The
Norwegian economic crime task force seized Johansen's
computers and cell phone from his home in Steinsholt, Norway.
The DVD Copy Control Association, the
plaintiff in the suits, asserts that the DeCSS program can be
used to copy DVDs.
A provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act forbids distribution of products designed to
crack copyright protection schemes, the studios argue.
The defense cites the same law, which
protects reverse-engineering "to ensure
interoperability" between platforms, says Tom McGuire,
vice president for marketing and communications at the
non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has provided
lawyers for the defendants.
"This isnt about piracy or Internet
hacking. No one is copying DVDs or posting them on the
Internet. At the fastest dial-up speed, it'll take over two
days to download a DVD movie. And the technology has always
existed for copying DVDs straight to a recorder. The only
issue is that this software breaks the monopoly that the
[Motion Picture Association of America] has engaged in with
Microsoft and Apple and gives people the freedom to watch DVDs
anywhere they wish," McGuire says.
DVDs are encoded with region-specific
details that allow the movies to only work with players in
their own region. In other words, a DVD encoded for North
America will only work on North American players. Also,
software DVD players for computers are only available for
Microsoft's Windows operating system and Apples MacOS.
DeCSS
supporters, such as the site OpenDVD.org, maintain that
illegally copying DVDs is also impractical because blank DVD
media costs more than the DVD movies themselves.
Last week, a U.S. District Court judge
ordered three people to remove DeCSS from their Web sites.
Another site has posted legal documents from
the suits, provided by unnamed sources connected to the case.
The site posted one document from a representative of the DVD
Copy Control Association, which included the entire source
code for DeCSS. However, a call to the California court where
the suit was filed showed that the document is not among the
public documents of the case. While most documents filed with
a court become public record, an attorney may seal sensitive
information through a protective order. Calls made to the
lawyer for the DVD CCA to confirm this were not returned.
The EFF sees the issue as a
David-and-Goliath battle with the MPAA. Spokespeople for the
group acknowledge that the technological issues may be
difficult for a court to handle, but more importantly they
fear the economic might of the entertainment companies.
"Were working hard to unite the
technical and civil liberties communities behind us,"
McGuire said, "but we dont have 10 or 20 million dollars
to spend."
CNN Interactive Technology
Editor D. Ian Hopper and Geir Terje Ruud of CNN
Norge contributed to this report.
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