Jon Lech Johansen (born November 18, 1983), also known as DVD Jon, is a Norway who was involved in the release of the DeCSS software. In 2002 he was put on trial in Norway but was found not guilty of any illegal behaviour. A second trial in 2003 resulted in him being acquitted a second time.

Johansen is featured in the film documentary info wars .

=Main claim to fame : the DeCSS prosecution=

The prosecution was conducted by Ã?kokrim, a Norwegian crime unit investigating and prosecuting economic crime, after a complaint by the United States DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPAA). Johansen has denied writing the decryption code in DeCSS, saying that this part of the project originated from someone in Germany. His defense was assisted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The trial opened in the Oslo district court on December 9, 2002 with Johansen pleading not-guilty to charges that had a maximum penalty of two years in prison or large fines. The defense argued that no illegal access was obtained to anyone else s information, since Johansen owned the DVDs himself. Also, they pointed out that it is legal under Norwegian law to make copies of such data for personal use. The verdict was announced on January 7, 2003 acquitting Johansen of all charges.

This being the verdict of the district court, two further levels of appeals were available to the prosecutors. Ã?kokrim filed an appeal on January 20, 2003 and it was reported on February 28 that the appeals court had agreed to hear the case. On March 5, 2003 the appeals court said that arguments filed by the movie industry and additional evidence merited another trial.

Johansen s second DeCSS trial began in Oslo on December 2, 2003, and resulted in an acquittal on December 22, 2003. Ã?kokrim announced on January 5, 2004 that it would not appeal the case any further.

=Other projects=

==2001==

In 2001, Johansen released OpenJaz, a reverse-engineered set of drivers for Linux, BeOS and Windows 2000 that allow operation of the JazPiper MP3 digital audio player without its proprietary drivers.

==2003==

In November 2003, Johansen released QTFairUse, an open source program which dumps the raw output of a QuickTime Advanced Audio Coding stream to a file, which could bypass the digital rights management (DRM) software used to encrypt content of music from media such as those distributed by the iTunes Music Store, Apple Computer s on-line music store. Although these resulting raw AAC files were unplayable by most media players at the time of release, they represent the first attempt at circumventing Apple s encryption.

==2004==

Johansen had by now become a ).

On .

On July 7, 2004 he released FairKeys, a program that can be used to retrieve the keys needed by DeDRMS from the iTunes Music Store servers itself.

On August 12, 2004 Johansen announced on his website that he cracked Apple s AirPort s encryption which lets users stream Apple Lossless files to their AirPort Express.

On November 25, 2004 he released a proof of concept program that allows Linux users (Via VLC) to play video encoded with Microsoft s proprietary WMV9 Codec, by porting the reference version of the software. This is a large development as Microsoft has been lobbying to have their codec used with the next DVD standard.

==2005==

On March 18, 2005, Travis Watkins and Cody Brocious, along with Johansen, wrote PyMusique, a Python programming language based program which allows the download of purchased files from the iTunes Music Store without DRM encryption. This was possible because Apple Computer s ITunes software adds the DRM to the music file after the music file is downloaded. On March 22, Apple Computer released a patch for the iTunes Music Store blocking the use of his PyMusique program. The same day, an update to PyMusique was released, circumventing the new patch.

On June 26, 2005, Johansen created a modification of Google s new in-browser video player (which was based on the open source VLC media player) in less than 24 hours after its release, to allow the user to play videos that are not hosted on Googles servers. The significance of the [http://nanocrew.net/p=114 modification] was exaggerated by the online media.

2 September, 2005, The Register published news that DVD Jon had hacked encryption in Microsoft s Windows Media Player by reverse engineering a proprietary algorithm ostensibly used to protect Media Player NSC files from hackers sniffing for the files source IP address, port or stream format; Johansen had also made a decoder available.

As of 2005, Johansen is now working at MP3tunes in San Diego as a software engineer. His first project is a new digital music product, code-named Oboe. [http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/A082F24382B9BE5CCC2570A0002C04C7OpenDocument]

=References=

*Articles at The Register : **Smith, Tony (March 18, 2005) – [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/18/itunes_pymusique/ DVD Jon: buy DRM-less tracks from Apple iTunes ] **Orlowski, Andrew (August 12, 2004) – [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/12/airport_express_cracked/ DVD Jon cracks Airport music streaming ] **Libbenga, Jan (January 2, 2004) – [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/02/dvd_jon_wins_again/ DVD Jon wins again ] **Clarke, Gavin (San Francisco. 2 September, 2005) – [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/02/dvd_jon_mediaplayer/ DVD Jon hacks Media Player file encryption ]

*Articles in Aftenposten :

=External links=