infobong.com

Jon Johansen, the teenage coder which created DeCSS, has been acquitted of hacking charges in Norwegian court. Johansen created DeCSS in order to watch DVDs on his Linux machine, but it raised Hollywood's ire, since it converts the scrambled content on a DVD to vanilla MPEG-2 and could potentially be used to pirate corporate culture. I was watching AOL-Time Warner-owned CNN Headline News tonight, and they framed the story almost exclusively in terms of piracy, calling it a DVD piracy trial, then noted at the end that Johansen was acquitted because prosecutors couldn't prove that DeCSS was intended to pirate movies. I think this is a good step for intellectual freedom, but its too bad we gringos have the DMCA, which outlaws any scrambling circumvention device, including DeCSS.