The german publisher Heise tells us that the American movie industry has finally failed to prosecute Jon Lech Johansen. A few days before christmas we could report that he was cleared of piracy charges, but the State Attorney still had the possibility to call the Norwegian supreme court. But this was not done, so the last verdict can not be revised anymore now. Johansen was sent to court for participating in the development of DeCSS - a tool that allows you to rip CSS protected DVDs to your harddisks.
Programs based on DeCSS circumvent the encryption mechanism Content Scrambling System (CSS) used as a copy protection on DVDs. The American movie industry sued Johansen for causing damage by participating in the development of DeCSS. |
This was obviously the last chance to win a lawsuit against Johansen who only wanted to watch DVDs with Linux. Maybe the State Attorney has not seen any chance to win this case. At least not the movie industry itself, who initially brought the case against Jon.
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Source: Heise.de
