DVD Jon (Jon Lech Johansen)
termcryptographyhacking
The Norwegian teenager who in 1999 co-released DeCSS, the program that decrypted DVD content scrambling so films could be played on Linux, and who was prosecuted twice in Norway and acquitted both times.
The case became the defining fight over whether code is speech: DeCSS circulated as a haiku, a T-shirt, a dramatic reading and a prime number, precisely because the courts were being asked to ban a number. Johansen's defence - that he was making a legally purchased disc play on his own computer - is the ancestor of every right-to-repair and interoperability argument since, and the affair fixed reverse engineering as the pivotal issue in the digital-rights debate.
Also known as: jon lech johansen, decss, css decryption