The Press Listens to Hollywood Instead of Facts
by Paul McGoldrick
A couple of months ago on these pages we told the story of the young man in Norway who has been dubbed DVD-Jon by admiring software hackers around the world. We reported his acquittal in the Oslo District Court of charges of digital theft - a decision that made us admire a set of judges who saw the commonsense of Jon Johansen's position in using his own property, to wit a legally-purchased DVD, in a Linux-powered computer using his own descrambling software, DeCSS.
The Motion Picture Association filed the original charges with Norway's Economic Crime Unit, and it obviously is not taking this judgement lying down as it has persuaded that department to appeal the acquittal - and the Borgarting Appeals Court, in Oslo, has agreed to take the case, representing what is virtually a repeat of the original trial.
To many of us that reeks of double jeopardy but any case, anywhere, can be appealed by either side - although in criminal cases we usually read only appeals by prosecutors about the apparent leniency of any sentencing. Nevertheless DVD-Jon will be back in court after the summer in what is a waste of money for all sides, although his lawyer apparently "saw it coming."
What infuriates me, however, is that the press just gets it wrong and is obviously listening to Hollywood instead of the facts. The prime reporting on the appeal has been through Reuters, and the story on Friday, February 28 has been picked up by many other services - most of them not reading it until the following Monday, March 3. This is a really good example of how little original reporting there is out there as you can read the same story again and again, with just a few words changed here and there: But all are presented under another's byline and passed off as original material. When this is done in supposedly respectable technology publications you just have to groan…
Reuters used word forms like, "Johansen had admitted to copying only legally purchased DVDs," "…teenager cleared of cyber piracy charges," "developed a computer program to copy DVD movies (sic)." All absolutely rubbish. DeCSS was developed by DVD-Jon when he was 15 and he wanted to play a DVD on his PC, not copy, and he was never charged with piracy. The fact that others may have used DeCSS to decode the algorithms in DVD security and then make copies is not what he wrote the program for and is not something that he did. He made no copies, did not admit to copying, did not develop the program to make copies.
At 15 he may have been rather naïve about what others might do with
the code he produced, but he was so proud of it that he published on the
Internet: Quite understandable. But now Hollywood has to win this one, to
prove it's not the problem.