Jon Lech Johansen

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Jon Lech Johansen

Jon Lech Johansen (born November 18, 1983 in Harstad, Norway), also known as DVD-Jon, is a Norwegian (his father is Norwegian and mother is Polish) who is famous for his work on reverse engineering data formats. He is most famous for his involvement in the release of the DeCSS software, which decodes the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement. Jon is a self-trained software engineer, who quit high school at the first year to spend more time with the DeCSS case. He moved to the United States and worked as a software engineer in October 2005 until November 2006, and has now moved back to Norway for unknown reasons.[1]

Johansen is featured in the documentary film info wars.

1 The DeCSS prosecution
2 Other projects
- 2.1 2001
- 2.2 2003
- 2.3 2004
- 2.4 2005
- 2.5 2006
3 Awards
4 References
5 Sources
6 External links

[edit] The DeCSS prosecution

After Johansen released DeCSS, he was prosecuted in Norway for computer hacking in 2002.

The prosecution was conducted by Økokrim, a Norwegian crime unit investigating and prosecuting economic crime, after a complaint by the US DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPA). 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 (Oslo tingrett) 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. They also argued 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, to the appeals court and then to the Supreme Court. Økokrim filed an appeal on January 20, 2003 and it was reported on February 28 that the appeals court (Borgarting lagmannsrett) had agreed to hear the case.

Johansen's second DeCSS trial began in Oslo on December 2, 2003, and resulted in an acquittal on December 22, 2003. Økokrim announced on January 5, 2004 that it would not appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

[edit] Other projects

[edit] 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 player without its proprietary drivers.

[edit] 2003

In November 2003, Johansen released QTFairUse, an open source program which dumps the raw output of a QuickTime AAC 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 online 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.

[edit] 2004

Johansen had by now become a VideoLAN developer, and had reverse engineered FairPlay and written VLC's FairPlay support. [2] It has been available in VideoLAN CVS since January 2004, but the first release to include FairPlay support is VLC 0.7.1 (released March 2, 2004).

On April 25, 2004 Johansen released yet another program: DeDRMS. Written in C#, this 230 line program is also said to remove copy prevention.

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 defeated Apple's AirPort Express's encryption which lets users stream Apple Lossless files to their AirPort Expresses.

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 significant development as Microsoft has been lobbying to have their codec used with the next DVD standard.

[edit] 2005

On March 18, 2005, Travis Watkins and Cody Brocious, along with Johansen, wrote PyMusique, a Python 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 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 Google’s servers. The significance of the modification was exaggerated by the online media.

In late summer, Håkon Wium Lie, the Norwegian co-creator of Cascading Style Sheets and long-time supporter of open source, named Jon Lech Johansen a "hero" in a net meeting arranged by one of Norway's biggest newspapers.^[1]

2 September 2005, The Register published news that DVD Jon had defeated encryption in Microsoft's Windows Media Player by reverse engineering a proprietary algorithm that was ostensibly used to protect Media Player NSC files from engineers sniffing for the files' source IP address, port or stream format. Johansen had also made a decoder available. [3]

September, 2005, Johansen announced the release of SharpMusique 1.0, an alternative to the default iTunes program. The program allows Linux and Windows users to buy songs from the iTunes music store without copy protection.

In 2005, Johansen worked for MP3tunes in San Diego as a software engineer. His first project was a new digital music product, code-named Oboe. [4]

In November 2005 a Slashdot story notes [5] that Sony-BMGs XCP DRM software includes code and comments (such as "copyright (c) Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved." [6]) illegally copied from an iTunes DRM circumvention program by Jon Lech Johansen. A popular claim was that, using the criteria that RIAA uses in its copyright lawsuits, Johansen could sue for billions of dollars in damages. [7]

[edit] 2006

On January 8, 2006, Johansen revealed [8] his intent to defeat the encryption of Next-Generation DVD encryption, AACS. It appears that Johansen is aiming for a winter 2006/2007 release of a circumvention application. [9]

On June 7, 2006, Johansen announced that he had moved to San Francisco and was joining DoubleTwist Ventures.

In October 2006, Johansen and DoubleTwist Ventures announced they had reverse engineered Apple Computer's DRM for iTunes, called FairPlay. Rather than allow people to strip the DRM, DoubleTwist would license the ability to apply FairPlay to media companies who wanted their music and videos to play on the iPod, without having to sign a distribution contract with Apple. [10]

[edit] Awards

January 2000 - Karoline award given to high-school students with excellent grades and noteworthy achievements in sports, arts or culture.
April 2002 - EFF Pioneer Award