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Jon Johansen, who is 16 years old, has been called as a defence witness in the trial of Eric Corley (known in the hacker community as Emmanuel Goldstein), publisher of the notorious 2600 e-zine. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) commenced a federal lawsuit against Corley after he allegedly posted the DeCSS utility on his own Web site and provided links to copies on hundreds of other servers.

The MPAA claims that this amounts to contributory infringement of copyright, because DeCSS is specifically designed to remove the

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anti-copying protection placed on DVDs.

Johansen is himself under investigation in Norway for intellectual property offences. Last year he and two other programmers developed DeCSS as a utility to enable Linux users to watch DVDs - at the time there was no Linux-compatible hardware or software available for this purpose. In creating the software the group discovered how to crack the CSS encryption on the disks. It subsequently made the DeCSS utility available for Windows PCs for "technical reasons."

The MPAA is arguing that Johansen's possibly noble motives for developing DeCSS are irrelevant where Corley's own liability is concerned.

Corley's lawyer, Martin Garbus, claims that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which his client is charged with violating, would contravene the First Amendment if the MPAA's interpretation were correct. Garbus contends that the Act must not prohibit unauthorised access to copyright works, even those protected by mechanisms such as CSS. The trial continues.

Joel Harrison

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