First the lawsuits were filed. Then the injunctions were granted. And now the arrests have begun.

Jon Johansen was arrested early Tuesday at his home in Norway. He's accused of writing DeCSS, the program that reverse engineered the DVD encryption scheme.

The 16-year-old says the program was written for the sole purpose of allowing DVD's to be played on the Linux operating system. The Motion Picture Association of America claims he broke intellectual property laws.

His father was also arrested because the web site was in his name. What's particularly interesting is that the two had already removed the source code from the site after being threatened by the MPAA. As any schoolkid knows, agreeing to a bully's terms rarely makes things any better.

This situation is continuing to deteriorate on a daily basis. If the MPAA thugs are able to get a kid and his father arrested in a distant country, one can only imagine what they have planned for the "violators" in this country.

Legal action has forced us to remove the DeCSS code from our site. It has NOT forced us to remove links to the growing number of sites worldwide that were not affected. And no court action in the world will ever stop us from speaking out against this insane abuse of power against free-thinking people everywhere.

We call on our readers to fight the MPAA on all fronts. Picket their offices, call them, fax them your opinion, educate the media, hand out leaflets outside your local movie theatre, and target each and every one of the companies that has signed onto this action.

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