http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28749.html The entertainment lobby has failed to persuade a Norwegian court to convict a teenager for creating a utility for playing back DVDs on his own computer. Jon Lech Johansen has been acquitted of all charges in a trial that tested the legality of the DeCSS DVD decryption utility he produced, Norwegian paper Aftenposten reports. Norwegian prosecutors, acting largely on the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), argued in court that Johansen acted illegally in sharing his DeCSS tool with others and distributing it via the Internet. They claimed the DeCSS utility made it easier to pirate DVDs. The court rejected these arguments, ruling that Johansen did nothing wrong in bypassing DVD scrambling codes that stopped him using his Linux PC to play back DVDs he'd bought. (They go on to say that it's not illegal to use DeCSS to play dvd's. So if you haven't already got a copy, you can get one now, in Sweden at least.) ............. There is a product called DVD region x for the xbox that allows you to play dvd's from any region coming out soon. As it probably has to be signed by Microsoft (as all xbox programs must be), can we assume that the regionalisation of DVD's silliness is effectively over? And apart from that, what was the point of CSS? You can do a "dd" on a DVD and play the image from a hard drive. I don't have a DVD burner, but I'd imagine you could burn a DVD from such an image, so direct copying is probably easy enough. Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't tried it, but the pirates don't seem to have any technical trouble. The regionalisation issue was another monopoly grab. The DVD format is as much a monopoly as Microsoft or Intel (probably more...) -- Peter Fairbrother