>He hadn't pirated anything, only made a program to view his DVDs in Linux.

He released a tool for circumventing a protection measure. While already illegal to do in America, it wasn't made illegal in Norway until less than 2 years later.

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gzread 2 hours ago | parent [-]

See also farmers repairing their tractors. Arguably you can just write DO NOT COPY on a sticker on the disc and then it's illegal to circumvent the sticker.

	▲	eesmith 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In the US the law makes it illegal to 'circumvent a technological measure', defined as: > descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner where > a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work. A sticker doesn't count as a "technological measure".