Jon Johansen Cleared On All Charges In DeCSS Case

from the phew dept

First ElcomSoft, and now Jon Johnasen. Could the courts actually be catching on to just how silly some of these copy protection laws are? Jon Johansen has been cleared on all charges for creating the DeCSS code that could be used to crack the encryption found on DVDs so that he could (gasp!) watch the DVDs he legally purchased on his Linux computer. The court found no evidence that he was helping people break the law. Perhaps more importantly, the court also agreed that there's absolutely nothing wrong with using DeCSS to watch a legally purchased movie. Hopefully courts outside of Norway will agree with this sort of reasoning when other cases come to trial.

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