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Just a year or so ago the average DVD player cost around $1,000 but now you can pick them up for less than a fifth that price and sales are booming.

Capitalising on what is a global surge in player sales, the movie industry has been launching a steady stream of movies and even top-rating TV series on DVD.

Everyone seems happy don't they? Consumers are getting great-quality movies in their own home and the studios are raking in sizeable sums from these sales.

So why is a guy called Jon Lech Johansen being dragged through the courts over in Norway?

Well Jon is the guy that wrote the now infamous DeCSS program that effectively breaks the copy-protection scheme designed to prevent DVDs being copied.

Now it makes sense that anyone who sets out to provide tools to aide and abet movie piracy should feel the full force of the law -- right?

Well perhaps that's true but Jon didn't write DeCSS to help people pirate movies on DVD at all.

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Jon's crime is that he is a Linux user who simply wanted to be able to watch commercial DVD movies on his PC but, thanks to the CSS copy protection scheme, couldn't.

That's right -- although people using MS Windows could fit a DVD drive and watch movies to their heart's content, the industry simply weren't interested in providing the same functionality for Linux users.

The fact that others have since taken Jon's code and turned it into general purpose DVD-ripping software is not Jon's fault -- any more than someone who makes crowbars can be blamed for every burglary where entry is forced by jimmying open a window or door.

An item of interest from the trial is the prosecution claim that "the access was a violation because the DVD films were sold on the condition that the user would use authorized playing equipment and respect the copy protection".

Did you know that this was a condition of sale tie to each and every DVD you buy?

Now the stupidest thing about this whole situation is that if a certified DVD player had been made available for the Linux OS, Jon probably wouldn't have written DeCSS and cat may have not gotten out of the bag.

But hang on, didn't I introduce this column by pointing out that DVD sales are booming?

So has the availability of DeCSS really had an impact on those sales?

I strongly doubt it.

Oh sure, a few people are undoubtedly ripping DVDs and burning them to DVDR media (or transcoding to SVCD and burning to CDR) -- but this is a process which remains significantly more complex and time-consuming than burning an audio CD so I doubt the effect on sales are even measurable.

So it seems that the movie industry have shot at their own foot (by not supporting the production of a Linux-based DVD player) and are now blaming some poor sod in Norway for the fact that there's a tiny little scratch on their big toe.

Give it up guys. The cat's out of the bag. Instead of trying to exact revenge simply because some 15-year-old did what you wouldn't, why don't you just concentrate on making some decent movies and selling them on DVD for a reasonable price.

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