Jon Johansen Trial

Jon Johansen, one of the three people of a group creating the DVD decryption program DeCSS (note DeCSS history is not at all the common media portrayal of the lone teen cracker breaking Hollywood's codes, no disrespect intended), is now undergoing his second criminal trial. I just mentioned he's in fact one of three people in the group - the other two are staying anonymous. And as I say, it should thus be screamingly obvious why they are staying anonymous - including the German programmer "Ham" who actually did that particular DeCSS reverse-engineering.

There's coverage, of course. IP Justice has a nice press release, and a very good DeCSS Litigation Timeline. EFF has useful Johansen DeCSS case archives

Jon Johansen's been facing criminal prosecution for around four years now. My heart goes out to him on that point. A criminal trial is one of the most stressful things a person can face. And he wasn't the critical decryption programmer either, keep that in mind (again, no offense meant). People just don't get it, whenever I talk about how I don't want to go through something like that myself. It's an abstraction. They see him being made into a hero, at least getting a defense, and they tell me I'll be a hero too. But I've never, ever, gotten a defense, quite the opposite. The lack of support drove me to quit. And these sorts of risks are part of the reason.

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)