The Norwegian known as DVD Jon was cleared of DVD piracy charges by an appeals court which ruled he broke no laws when he created and distributed the DeCSS program that unlocked DVD encryption and enabled DVD copying.
The ruling is considered a big setback for the film industry which says piracy costs them at least $3 billion a year in lost sales, according to CNET.
Jon Johansen pleaded not guilty to breaking Norwegian law by helping break the DVD encryption code. A trial court held in January that he was free to do as he pleased with DVDs he purchased legally, but the movie industry appealed that verdict.
Johansen isn't exactly out of hot water just yet, however: he was recently suspected of having broken the code that protects files on Apple's iTunes Music Store. And the movie industry can still appeal the latest setback to Norway's Supreme Court, though CNET said it wasn't yet certain the Motion Picture Association of America would do so.
The Johansen ruling came as news broke that at least ten thousand pirated copies of The Return of the King, the third film in the trilogy based on the J.R.R. Tolkein series The Lord of the Rings, were known to be on the Internet since the film's official release.
These copies were said to be hitting such peer-to-peer networks as Grokster and KaZaA, with many of the copies extremely high quality, according to CBS Marketwatch. Eric Garland, who runs BigChampagne, a company monitoring Internet file swapping, told Wired that the likely source was movie industry insiders.
"It takes only one copy," he said. "Digital copies can and will be made ad infinitum and freely and instantaneously distributed."
