Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, is a Norwegian programmer famous for his work on reverse engineering data formats... (wikipedia)
I don't have the identity of any of them. I only had the nicks that they used on Internet Relay Chat.
Basically, if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail.
Basically, if I have no intention of using a service then I won't bother reverse-engineering it.
I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it.
I still haven't heard anything from Apple about my hacks. There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay called jhymn that's been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened.
Well, the biggest Norwegian newspaper regarded this as an arrest, since they hadn't told us that they were coming and they brought me in. So the biggest Norwegian newspaper looked upon that as an arrest.
We knew that they would probably go after someone.
I've probably bought ten CDs in my whole life.
Companies shouldn't use the law to prevent consumers from doing something legal.
Anyone with a little computer experience knows that anything can be copied bit by bit with the right equipment.
All over the world copyright holders are trying to limit consumers' rights. We cannot have that.
I took a job in the U.S. because I wanted to work on products that would get into end users' hands. In Norway, most of the jobs are in server software, niche stuff.
So DeCSS didn't introduce anything new for pirating and had already been available.
I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part.