First music, then movies, then books. The genie is out of the bottle with digital technolgy. IF you can make a copy to use it, there doesnt seem to be any way to keep people from making illegal copies.
Digital media is a thorny problem where someone will have to think out of the box to create a system that balances freedom and ownership.
Repro Man
Meet the 21-year-old Norwegian who defied Hollywood to help the world copy DVDs -- and beat the studios in court. Now, he's liberating your iPod.
October 15, 2005
Jon Lech Johansen dropped out of high school after just one year. He lives alone most of the time, except when he stays with his parents in his native Norway. The 21-year-old doesn't drive, rarely goes to parties and says he has no close friends, except his father. He spends about nine hours a day in front of his computer screen.
Yet this reclusive young Norwegian is the man who may be the entertainment industry's worst nightmare. Mr. Johansen, Hollywood executives claim, has done more than almost anyone in the world to ignite the explosion of movie piracy on the Internet, costing them billions of dollars in lost sales. He scoffs at that.
Jon Lech Johansen says people should be able to use legally bought digital entertainment however they like.
At the age of 15, Mr. Johansen wrote a computer program that allowed users to copy DVDs. Then he posted it on the Internet. A Norwegian private school awarded him a prize for making an outstanding contribution to society. The Norwegian government indicted him.
Mr. Johansen may not be a household name in America. But he is lionized by people who, like him, believe that when they legally buy digital entertainment they should be free to use it as they please; fans have downloaded more than a million copies of his free software programs.
Piracy of copyrighted entertainment isn't new. For years, people copied record albums onto cassette tapes and traded them, a violation of copyright law that was generally overlooked because the quality of the copies wasn't great. But with the advent of digital entertainment on compact discs and more powerful personal computers, perfect copies could be made easily. The music industry initially took no technological steps to prevent copying from CDs. When DVDs were introduced in 1997, the film industry encrypted their content to try to avoid the piracy then already beginning to plague the music business.
