The criminal trial against Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who watched his DVDs on his Linux computer using a DVD descrambling program called DeCSS, will start in Norway this Monday, December 9. The trial is scheduled to last until Friday, December 13.
After a request from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (ØKOKRIM) charged Jon Johansen for unscrambling DVDs using DeCSS in 1999 when he was 15 years old.
Johansen is charged with violating the Norwegian Criminal Code section 145(2), which outlaws breaking into another person's locked property to gain access to data that one is not entitled to access.
Johansen's indictment came more than two years after the MPAA initially contacted ØKOKRIM prosecutors to request a criminal investigation of the Norwegian teen and his father, Per Johansen, who owned the equipment on which the DeCSS software was stored. The charges against Johansen's father were later dropped.
Update News.com is reporting that Alleged DVD hacker pleads not guilty to charges of illegally making software that copies movies, in a landmark case seen as a battle between cyber-Davids and corporate Goliaths.
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