And so, after all of the suspense, Jon Johansen took the stand.
Imagine that you're 16 years old, your computer equipment was confiscated earlier this year in a midnight raid, you and your father have had criminal charges file against you which are still pending while the prosecutors decide whether to bring the charges to court, and now you take the stand and swear the oath in a case in another country's criminal justice system... not even in your native language.
Sound intimidating? That's what I thought. But young Jon Johansen took it all in stride, answering the questions that were put to him and calmly saying what he had to say.
Today's highlights:
Two points for calling the operating system GNULinux! If you don't know what I'm talking about, go visit the Free Software Foundation pages.
Another 2 points for the bet soundbyte description of Copyleft I've ever heard.
Simms: What is Copyleft?Johansen: A copyright that gives the users freedoms instead of taking them away.
For his work on DeCSS and his good grades, Johansen got some sort of award that is given to outstanding high school students. Along with the award came a financial bonus of $2000. He immediately took $1200 of it and went out and bought... a Sony DVD player.
If the MPAA has their way, a lot of store employees in Norway are going to find themselves at the wrong end of a lawsuit. Although all DVD players from the factory shipped to Norway are set to play only "Region 2" (European) DVD's, DVD resellers typically reset them so they can play DVD's from any region, before selling them to the end consumer. "The Internet interprets artificial boundaries as damage and routes around them"? With a few helping hands, that is...
The plaintiffs' last witness also took the stand today: Mikhail Reider, manager of worldwide Internet antipiracy operations for the MPAA.I was having a hard time reconciling her master's of philosophy in international conflict resolution with her previous posts in intelligence gathering and analysis at the DoJ and FBI. At any rate, her department oversees all Internet investigation and does daily snooping out of Internet sites. Yes, they watch IRC, ftp sites, and the like.
So, the question is, with all of this monitoring and intelligence gathering and so on, why have they singled out just this one person, who posted the code in an on-line publication, instead of some piracy site using it (if there are any), or any piracy site at all using any of the applications that are out there?
Yeah, I dunno either.
Analogy of the day: according to Judge Kaplan, the plaintiffs are asking the court to order this defendant to lock the barn door, although there's no horse in it.
"Huh?" you say. I guess you kinda had to be there...