DVD Jon Acquittal Upheld
from the another-notch-against-stupid-lawsuits dept
Well, it’s been quite a few days against bad entertainment industry lawsuits. The latest is that, over in Norway, “DVD Jon” Lech Johansen has won the appeal on his case for creating and releasing the DeCSS code. This is a good ruling, though, it’s likely the movie industry will appeal to the country’s Supreme Court. The case revolves around whether it was illegal for Jon to create some code that would allow him to view movies that he purchased legally on his own computer running Linux. The movie industry says that he broke their encryption to do so. The original ruling said that he had done nothing wrong, and the Appeals Court echoes that in their ruling today, saying that Jon could go ahead and make copies of DVDs he legally owned – and that he did not break the law in creating software to help him do so.
Comments on “DVD Jon Acquittal Upheld”
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The entire debate over copyright is unfortunately too narrowly defined in favor of business interests. I am very concerned about where all of this will lead to. Will libraries become an institution of the past? Not so long ago records were lent out from libraries, but the music industry successfully transformed the definition of music as culture into music as a commodity.
Re: No Subject Given
Ben Franklin would have a hit put out on him by the RIAA if he were to even dare to suggest something like a free libarary for all today.