Norwegian prosecutors will appeal the acquittal of a teenager charged with digital burglary for creating and circulating online a programme that cracks the security codes on DVDs.
Rune Floisbonn, a prosecutor with Norway’s economic crimes police, told the NTB news agency on Monday that an appeal would be filed. He did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.
Jon Lech Johansen (19) was found innocent of violating Norway’s data break-in laws on January 7 in a ruling that gave prosecutors two weeks to decide whether to appeal the high profile case. That deadline expires on Tuesday.
”An appeal was expected,” Johansen’s attorney, Halvor Manshaus, told AP. ”I haven’t gotten it confirmed … but I believe it is correct and that there will be an appeal.”
Floisbonn told Nettavisen, a Norwegian online newspaper, that prosecutors would challenge the Oslo City Court’s interpretation of the law and the evidence presented in their case against Johansen.
This case was seen as an important test of how far copyright holders can go in preventing duplication of their intellectual property.
Johansen, who was 15 when he developed and posted the programme on the Internet in 1999, said he developed the software only to watch movies on a Linux-based computer that lacked DVD-viewing software.
The short program is just one of many readily available programs that can break the film industry’s Content Scrambling System, which prevents illegal copying but also prevents the use of legitimate copies on unauthorised equipment.
Charges against Johansen were filed after Norwegian prosecutors received a complaint from the Motion Picture Association of America and the DVD Copy Control Association, the group that licenses CSS.
The three-member Oslo court ruled unanimously that Johansen, who works as a programmer in Oslo, could not be convicted of breaking into DVDs that were his own property, since he had bought them legally. – Sapa-AP