IP Justice Media Release
Contact: Robin Gross, Executive Director, IP Justice,
robin@ipjustice.org
+1 415.553.6261
Halvor Manshaus, Attorney, Advokatfirmaet Schjødt AS,
halvor.manshaus@schjodt.no
+ 47 22 01 88 00
Norwegian
Appeals Court Orders Johansen Retrial
Hollywood
Pushes to Outlaw Competing DVD Player Software
(Oslo) - Norwegian teen Jon Johansen faces a retrial after an
appeals court in Norway agreed to rehear the case on February 28, 2003. Johansen is known internationally as
“DVD-Jon” for his role in creating DeCSS DVD decoding software.
On a complaint filed by Hollywood movie studios in 2002,
Johansen was charged under a Norwegian data theft law for trying to build DVD
playing software. Hollywood lawyers and
Norwegian prosecutors claim that because Johansen tried to watch his own DVD
movies on equipment outside of Hollywood’s control, the teen should be
criminally prosecuted for unauthorized access to DVDs.
On January 7, 2003 a three-judge panel in Oslo’s city court
cleared Johansen of all charges and ruled that people who try to watch their
own DVDs on their own computers do not violate copyright or anti-hacking laws,
since its their own property. “The
court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has
legal access to the film,” the ruling said.
Based on objections raised by prosecutors about the
application of law and the presentation of evidence before the city court trial
in December 2002, the Borgarting appeals court in Norway accepted the case for
a retrial to begin in Summer 2003.
“If Johansen’s acquittal is over-turned on appeal, Hollywood
will be granted unprecedented control over what people can do with their own
property in the privacy of their own homes,” said Robin Gross, Executive
Director of IP Justice, an international civil liberties organization that advocates
for individual control over the private viewing experience of DVD movies.
If Johansen is convicted, it will become illegal for
Norwegians to bypass DVD region code restrictions, fast-forward over
commercials, or otherwise circumvent digital controls on their own
property. The 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act already outlawed this type of legitimate consumer circumvention
in the US, and numerous European Union countries are presently considering
similar anti-circumvention laws.
Brought under Norwegian criminal code section 145.2, which
outlaws bypassing technological controls to access data one is not entitled to
access, the charge carries a penalty of two years in prison. This case marks the first time this law is
used to prosecute a person for accessing his own property. In the past, this data theft law outlawed
accessing another person’s bank or phone records, or other data that one has no
lawful right to access.
“This case is about more than freedom of speech and fair use
rights,” Robin Gross said. “If Johansen
is found guilty, competition and innovation will also be harmed since people
will be forbidden from creating their own means of watching their DVDs, and
instead, will be forced to purchase DVD players with features that are controlled
by Hollywood’s movie studios,” said Gross, an intellectual property attorney.
According
to Jon Johansen’s attorney in Oslo, "this appeal means we will have a
full-scale retrial of the case in its entirety, witnesses and all,” said Halvor
Manshaus. “Johansen has carried the
burden of this prosecution since he was only a minor, and the court’s full
acquittal from January of this year has served to strengthen his resolve.
I am confident with regard to the final outcome of the case - in the end,
a ruling from a higher level court will give our arguments a greater principle
significance," Manshaus said.
At the age of fifteen, Johansen assisted in the creation of
DeCSS software that unlocks DVD movies in an effort to build a DVD player for
the Linux operating system. In 1999
Johansen first published DeCSS to the “LiVID List,” a team of Linux developers
building open source DVD playing software.
From late 1999 – 2000 Hollywood movie studios filed several lawsuits in
California, New York, and Connecticut to ban the publication of the computer
code.
In 2000, a court in New York banned journalists at 2600
Magazine from publishing DeCSS or even hyper-linking to other websites that
publish the computer code that is necessary for unlocking DVDs. That ruling was
upheld by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001.
Based on the free speech rights of web publishers, in
November 2001 the California Court of Appeals lifted an earlier injunction
against hundred of web publishers accused of trade secret misappropriation for
publishing DeCSS. Johansen has also
been sued in this case, which is currently pending before the California
Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court
rejected a petition to stay the injunction's lifting in January 2003.
More Information:
See IP Justice timeline of DeCSS litigation: http://www.ipjustice.org/publications/decsstable.htm
Jon Johansen's page: http://www.nanocrew.net/
Electronic Frontier Foundation Johansen Archive:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/DeCSS_prosecutions/Johansen_DeCSS_case/
Electronic Frontier Norway: http://www.efn.no/
Jon Johansen's defense fund: http://www.eff.org/support/jonfund.html
OKOKRIM: http://www.okokrim.no/
IP Justice is a grassroots membership based civil liberties organization
that promotes balanced intellectual property law. IP Justice defends individual rights to use digital media
worldwide and is a registered California non-profit organization. IP Justice was founded in 2002 by Robin
Gross, who serves as its Executive Director.
To learn more about IP Justice, visit the website at
http://www.ipjustice.org.
