Update On The Jon Johansen Trial

nordicfrost writes "The trial against Jon Johansen goes on. Today, John Hoy of the DVD CCA was examined by phone by the defense and the prosecutor in Oslo. We have set up a page to follow the main events in the trial here, in English. The documentation of evidence, and the fact that Hoy didn't answer the phone when the court called, delayed the trial so the final proceedings may not be finished before Monday afternoon." Update: 12/12 23:50 GMT by T : This wasn't really a Science story ...

Doesn't it set things off poorly...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

...when someone who would be a star witness does the telephone equivalent of not showing up in court? I wouldn't think that this would completely blow the case against the defendant, but I would imagine that many judges wouldn't give the prosecution much slack if they pulled a stunt like that.

Re:Who is he?

[JonWan]

Sorry but he didn't write DCSS, some guy in germany did and remained anonymous. Jon tested it and posted it to the newsgroup.

Re:DeCSS and such

[Xerithane]

DeCSS is, in theory, an excellent piece of coding. The problem, as is true with technologies along its lines, is that there is quite a bit of room for abuse.

Not the part Jon wrote. He violated the GPL by taking other peoples "excellent code" that was released GPL. Check the real history on it (In regards to LiViD) and understand that Jon was just trying to be greedy and stupid.

Granted, it's bunk he's on trial but he's not a saint. He also has posted rather inflammatory things about Linux (and totes FreeBSD) on mailing lists before he tried to harness the Linux communities support.

Not a hero

[kyrre]

When you read about Jon Johansen you shold realize that he is not a hero. Not only did tok credit for stuff other people did, he broke the GPL. http://people.debian.org/~kju//decsstruth.txt [debian.org]. However one thing he did not do was break norwegian law. The aternoey representing the state is even having trouble figuring out what illegal he has done. People talk about how this is important in regard to similar cases that may accure in the future. I say we found a pretty lousy guy to represent 'us'.

CSS vs. CSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Håkon Wium Lie has written an interesting article [opera.com] on the trial called "CSS vs. CSS".

Today's two highlights were the sudden evaporation of two witnesses' ability to answer obvious questions. First, Mr John Hoy (62), president of DVD CCA, did not understand his own organization's definition of "Copy Protection Functions". By answering questions on this topic he would undermine the prosecutor's position on "copy protection", so he suddenly turned stale and the defense gave up questioning him.

The other highlight was when another witness of the prosecutor was asked if "zone-free" DVD players are easily available in the market. The witness claimed not to know. Now, anyone in Norway remotely interested in DVD technology must be unusually dense not to know that most players sold here are "zone-free" -- the players break the DVD CCA rules by allowing people to play the US editions of DVD movies. Why Jon is charged when zone-free DVD players are sold openly in the store next door is a question worth asking.

Re:Not a hero

[Anonymous Coward]

A different viewpoint [harvard.edu]:

I read through a lot of the list and several things struck me. Overall,
I see the list as lending a lot of credibility to Johansen's case. I
don't see it casting doubt as to this.

Overall, I think the livid-dev mailing list shows Johansen was trying
to contribute to Linux (and FreeBSD) and shared code with Derek Fawcus
as a liason to bring this about. He clearly believed _before_ he was
arrested that his actions were consistent with the DMCA and measured
them carefully.

Re:DeCSS and such

[mcc]

I think the key here is rather than trying to put this guy away, DVD manufacturers should work with the DeCSS technology to find a happy medium.

This is what you're missing. The DVD Forum people don't want a "happy medium". They want three things:

1. They want to recieve license fees for every dvd-capable video player in existence.
2. They want every dvd-capable video player in existence to work by their rules-- i.e., the ones that allow content producers to completely set what it is possible to do with each disc. I.e. the Sixth Sense 'you cannot access the menu until you watch this trailer for another movie, every time you insert the dvd', or the thing on certain dvds that won't let you pause, or framestep, or whatever.
3. They want to retain an unchallenged sense of control over their ordered little world.

Which one of these three is the focus varies, but in general #2 is the biggie here, at least because of a perception that content producers flocked to DVD solely becuase they had that level of control. At some point, it seemed that DVD peoples fear that if content producers lost that control, they'd stop putting so much stuff on dvds, switch to another format, or try to take legal action of some kind.

#2 is the biggie insofar as linux goes first off becuase "the linux community" will not truly be happy using a closed source video player-- there will always be the person upset he couldn't play dvds on his 10-year-old sparc because the "approved" propeitary player is x86 and PPC only. But much more importantly, this is a problem because open source platforms inherently empower the user. In the end, the user is in control of everything on the OS. This scares the DVD forum. Remember: In order for Apple to get the DVD forum to let them license their dvd player, Apple was forced to write the dvd player in such a way that it refuses to run if MacsBug, the system-level debugger is running, because MacsBug lets you do things like branch to unscheduled subroutines at random moments, and such would have allowed people to take screenshots while the DVD is running! This is a fairly big thing, MacsBug is a versatile tool that LOTS of people run for various reasons, and it is the best/only way to debug many pieces of software. Because there were potential uses of MacsBug that allowed the user to evade the control the DVD forum wants, macsbug users have to switch the thing off and restart anytime they want to watch a DVD.Given this, why on earth do you think the dvd forum would be okay with allowing any DVD player, even a propeitary one, on an OS where everything in the OS including the device drivers can be re-coded by the user?

Of course, the macsbug thing is a sham: a simple machine-code hack patch thing which is very readily available will allow anyone to alter the dvd player app so that it doesn't notice macsbug. But despite this, Apple still has to leave the "no macsbug" code in the OS 9 version of the DVD player, lest they offend the DVD consortium's illusion of complete control, which they must for some reason maintain to themselves at all costs.

If the DVD people were interested in a happy medium, i'm almost certain one would have been reached. Remember, the mathematical flaws in CSS remained uncracked for *years* while CSS was just being used for satellite TV; CSS was only knocked over after millions of linux users were left with the alternatives of either someone hacking CSS, or not being able to use products they paid good money for without booting into windows. The "hackers" can sometimes compromise.. but the DVD forum people cared more about control than compromise, and so the LiViD people went around the DVD forum... and we now have DeCSS.

Re: Pass it along.

[jjo]

"You go anywhere and people speak English because we are big tourists."

No, they speak English because the tourists don't speak any other languages.

No, it's because English is the new lingua franca. Anyone who wants to get along in international business had better learn English. Even businessmen with no customers in anglophone countries learn English, because it's the new common tongue. I once spoke with an anti-aircraft artilleryman in the Finnish military. To learn about the complex systems his unit uses, he had go to classes where they were manufactured: in Russia and France. What language do you think the classes were held in? English, of course!

This is not to say that Americans should not learn more foreign languages (I myself speak French, German and Italian), but we are often in the enviable position of being able to expect other people to learn our language. This is, of course, unfair, but it's also reality.