Teen a Villain to Hollywood, a Hero to Hackers

STEINSHOLT, Norway —  In the basement of an old farmhouse deep in the Norwegian countryside, a 15-year-old computer geek named Jon Lech Johansen pecked out the finishing touches on a piece of programming that had been keeping him busy after school and homework.

Jon says he didn’t realize it at the time, but when he pressed “enter” on his keyboard 16 months ago and launched his handiwork into cyberspace, he was setting off an intercontinental earthquake.

The program he wrote over a few weeks on his home-assembled Pentium 600 computer would rattle Hollywood, unleash lawsuits, mobilize demonstrators in his defense and prompt Norwegian police to haul him in for a night of questioning.

At 57 kilobytes, the tiny program is no more than the computer equivalent of a heartbeat. But what it does is frightening to anyone with a financial stake in the entertainment industry:

It enables you to copy movies onto any computer with a DVD drive and send them out unscrambled on the Internet. As bandwidth increases, it will become easier and faster to download these movies. And then the question will be, why pay $3.99 to rent Hollywood’s latest blockbuster when you can see it for free without leaving home? And why buy a DVD player if your home PC can do the job?

To the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which represents the major Hollywood studios, putting the program on the Internet for anyone to download was “akin to a tool that breaks the lock on your house.”

Fame ‘Tiresome’

Future historians may one day look back on it as a defining moment, when the boundless freedoms inherent in the Internet collided head-on with a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry wrapped up in its own technological revolution.

Jon doesn’t go in much for philosophizing. He’s 17 now, a down-to-earth mailman’s son in wire-rimmed spectacles, peach fuzz on his upper lip struggling to be a mustache, a sprinkle of acne on his cheek. He finds his fame in the worldwide hacker fraternity “a little tiresome.” The headlines calling him Norway’s “Teen Data Genius” make him laugh.

“Genius?” snorts Jon. “I know at least 10 people who could have done the same thing under the same circumstances.”

Which is what makes his little computer program so scary to Hollywood.

He knew that the program could get him into trouble, and for a while after launching it in late October 1999, he removed the hard drive from his computer each night and hid it in case the law showed up. But when weeks went by with no reaction, he stopped doing that.

The Encino Connection

But his program had been noticed, especially in an office block 5,300 miles away in Encino, Calif., where a team of computer whizzes patrols the Internet on behalf of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, searching for copyright violations.

In Internet chat rooms there was excited talk among hackers about a discovery called DeCSS. CSS stands for Content Scrambling System, meaning the code that protects DVDs. Someone had found a way to “de-CSS” the discs, meaning the movies they contain could be played on an ordinary computer instead of on a special DVD player and could be copied over and over to infinity.

In the drab Ventura Boulevard office, brightened by the classic poster of Marilyn Monroe in billowing white skirt, the MPAA’s team tested DeCSS by copying the movie “You’ve Got Mail” from a DVD. It worked.

DVDs--Digital Versatile Discs--look like compact discs, and their sales have soared: 64 million in 1999 in the United States alone. Unlike videotapes, copied DVDs don’t lose quality, and Hollywood envisioned millions of dollars in royalties disappearing if its movies suddenly became available for free on the Internet.

The code was easy to break, experts say, partly because the United States long banned exports of more advanced encryption technology lest it fall into hostile hands. For the MPAA, whose members include Disney, Sony, MGM, Paramount, Universal, Warner and Twentieth Century Fox, the ban left a big hole in the copyright armor.

A hacker network that calls itself MoRE--Masters of Reverse Engineering--obtained parts of the CSS code and worked out the rest. Jon is a member of MoRE. He says he got the codes from a German and a Dutchman.

The Norwegian youth took the next step, writing a program that incorporated the codes and that would allow users to copy movies.

Jon was 15; he had no money and nothing to lose. So he identified himself when posting the program. And the other two hackers?

“They didn’t dare go public, probably because they had jobs and things,” he surmises. “I don’t know who they are. It is probably better that I don’t.”

Three months later, when the knock finally came on the door of the farmhouse, it was the evening of Monday, Jan. 24, 2000. The visitors were officers of the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime.

“I was very surprised they came so late,” Jon says. “If I had wanted to, three months would have been plenty of time to destroy the evidence.”

The police took the youngster, his computers and mobile phone to the local police station and questioned him, he says, for six or seven hours.

Inger Marie Sunde of the economic crime unit in Oslo said that the force acted on an MPAA complaint, and that no decision has been made on whether to press charges.

Jon’s father, Per, the local mailman, is a veteran Internet surfer and owns the Web site where his son posted the code. So he too was interrogated, but at home, because he was sick.

Per Johansen managed to phone the Norwegian media, and before the police finished asking questions, reporters were at the door.

A burly, amiable man with a scrub of whiskers, he says he had no idea what his son had been up to.

Jon insists he wrote the program only to be able to watch DVDs on his own computer, using the Linux operating system, and not with the intent of copying and spreading the movies.

Movie Industry Dismayed

Mark Litvack, of the MPAA in Hollywood, says word in the chat rooms was different.

“It was people talking about it on the Internet saying, ‘Look, there’s a way to make a copy of a DVD on your hard drive.’ It wasn’t a group of Linux users saying, ‘We can play the DVD on our computers.’ ”

After the interrogation, Jon posted an angry note on the Internet. He had just gotten home at 2 a.m., he wrote. “I haven’t eaten, and someone’s definitely going to pay for this.” He got 500 e-mails that night, and the spread of DeCSS through the Internet picked up pace.

“I think he knew something might happen, but I don’t think he reckoned that there would be as much trouble as there was,” says his father.

The family was getting up to 100 phone calls a day, plus thousands of e-mails and swarms of reporters.

“It got to be a bit too much,” says Jon’s mother, Maria.

Jon’s classmates and teachers at the Thor Heyerdahl Secondary School were flabbergasted.

“He had told me he was working on something, but I hadn’t expected to read about it on the front pages,” says Thomas Aaler, a classmate.

Fame didn’t change Jon, said his Norwegian-language teacher, Erik Gjestvang. “He was the same nice, open, trusting boy.”

Jon is described as quiet, friendly, a brilliant student, fluent in Norwegian, French, English and Polish. His mother was born in Poland, and his middle name, Lech, honors the Polish anticommunist hero Lech Walesa.

Living in an isolated house, 50 miles from Oslo and an hour’s bus ride from school, Jon is used to working alone. That, says a teacher, Jan Gangaard, may explain why the boy turned to the Internet for companionship.

Jon and his father laugh at that idea. “I would have been programming anywhere,” Jon says.

“By the time he was 7, I had to buy him a computer because mine was always occupied,” his father says. Dressed in his mailman’s uniform, he stands chatting in a yard filled with building materials for restoring the old farmhouse.

“An endless project,” sighs Maria Johansen.

In the basement stand several computer monitors. A bulletin board holds hacker conference tags identifying Jon as a speaker. A national academic prize he won last year is on the wall.

Some hackers have held demonstrations in the United States on his behalf, waving giant pictures of him, claiming his freedom of speech is under attack.

“He gets a lot of respect for hacking skills. He’s willing to come forward publicly and take whatever responsibility, good or bad,” said Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group backing defendants in New York and California DeCSS court cases.

“It’s really a matter of principle for this young man,” he said in a telephone interview from California.

“They [the MPAA] made it clear he is one of the targets here,” Gross said. “They pick on a little guy, and it only brings more support for his cause.”

The MPAA rejects the bullying image. On its Web site it says that “in some areas of the world, video pirates have driven legitimate video merchants out of business.” DeCSS, it says, hands “the keys to the castle” to copyright pirates, hurting the livelihood of thousands of people, from big-name stars to grips, gaffers and carpenters.

On Per Johansen’s road-weary Toyota van are stickers in English saying “geek” and “FREE JON JOHANSEN,” even though Jon was not jailed and is unlikely to be. The complexities of trying a Norwegian juvenile on charges originating in California would be huge.

The MPAA has sued others, mainly New York-based 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and its publisher, Eric Corley, for promoting DeCSS online. Jon testified at that trial but was not named in the suit.

In August, a district court in New York ruled for the film industry, saying posting DeCSS “is analogous to the publication of a bank vault combination in a national newspaper.”

It ordered the program removed from the Internet.

Easier said than done. DeCSS can still be found on hundreds of Web sites. And the legal battle rages on.

Backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2600 magazine appealed the ruling in January. It says the computer code is a language, protected as free expression. It also argues that the DVD players prevent owners from being able to take full advantage of the DVDs they purchase, such as fast-forwarding past commercials or making copies, all of which can be done on computers.

Meanwhile, Jon is named as a defendant in a California civil case, in which the MPAA claims the DeCSS program violates trade secrecy laws. It is expected to go to trial soon.

Jon says he’s not worried, and when asked if he would do it all again, he replies unhesitatingly: “Yes, clearly.”

His notoriety won him job offers from computer companies, and he quit school to work for a Norwegian software developer but has since moved on to a new job whose details can’t be revealed, his father says.

Per Johansen still jokes about the fuss, wondering aloud: “Maybe Hollywood wants to buy the rights to his story?”

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https://www.eff.com

https://www.2600.com

https://www.mpaa.org

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Gary Gentile in Los Angeles and Peter Svensson in New York contributed to this story.