Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian amateur programmer who took on Hollywood and won, is suing Oekokrim, the Norwegian white collar crime unit that took him to court on behalf of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).

Oekokrim prosecutors recently announced they won’t appeal the court ruling that upheld Johansen’s acquittal for alleged copyright violations, effectively killing Hollywood’s last, desperate attempt to nail him as an example to the world.

Four years after the first MPAA attack, Johansen now wants compensation to the tune of NOK 150,000 (about $20,000), says Norway’s Aftenposten here.

“There was no immediate reaction from the prosecutors (Oekokrim), who lost their effort to prove that the young computer expert made it possible to copy DVDs and then spread his decoding information for DVDs via the Internet,” says the paper.

Interestingly, Hollywood abandoned its ‘trade secret‘ court battle against another programmer who in 1999 posted the code.

But, "We are not backing off," Robert Sugarman, an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association, is quoted as saying in an Associated Press story here. "We are exploring different routes."

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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