Prosecutors let DVD-Jon's victory stand (Aftenposten) [LWN.net]

Aftenposten reports that Jon Lech Johansen has finally been acquitted of all charges. "It was widely expected that Norway's white-collar crime unit would appeal the case to the country's supreme court (Hoeyesterett), but prosecutors clearly changed their minds. There was no immediate reason given as to why they dropped the case." (Thanks to haraldt)

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Andrew Bunner case in California

Posted Jan 7, 2004 4:36 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Worth noting again... this result bears on the Andrew Bunner trade-secret case in California. That court found that since the trade secret was (supposedly) illegally obtained, Andrew Bunner and several hundred "John Does" had acted improperly in posting DeCSS, and ordered them not to post it. That order applied to states in the 2nd Circuit, including several western states, but also would have carried weight as precedent in other areas.

At the hearing the question came up whether in fact the reverse engineering involved was legal under Norwegian law. The judge called for opinions from Norwegian lawyers. The plaintiff trotted out a tame Norwegian lawyer who asserted (without support of any kind) that it was not legal. The defendant's lawyer said nothing in Norwegian law or case law supported any opinion one way or the other. The judge took that to mean that in fact it wasn't legal. That meant that the DVD-CCA still had a valid trade secret in CSS.

Now that it's established that in fact the reverse engineering was legal, Bunner et al. should be able to have the decision vacated. (Shame on that judge for his bias.) This should mean that the DVD-CCA's trade secret protection on CSS cannot any longer be enforced.

Is there any word on whether the EFF will act on this?