Yesterday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett representing the member association NUUG, alongside the member association EFN and the DNS registrar IMC, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no. It was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my life.
The case at hand is that the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime decided on their own, to seizure a DNS domain early last year, without following the official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority which require a court decision. The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn Time. Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen. From the other side there were two people from Økokrim (Elisabeth Harbo-Lervik and Stian Petersen). On the benches, appearing to be part of the government group were two people from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office (Hedda Heier and Nicholas Foss Barbantonis), and three others I am not quite sure who was.
I did not quite know what to expect, but the government held on to their version of the story and we held on to ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all. Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as it is expensive to be right also in Norway. So far the case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-. NUUG and EFN have asked for donations to help fund this case, but only received around NOK 25 000,- so far. Thus we are quite a bit short. And if we win, I expect the government to appeal. And if the government appeal, I hope we have enough funding to run our own appeal.
If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS domain is hijacked by the government, or the Popcorn Time technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you donate to the NUUG defence fund. Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action, the rest will be spend promoting free software, open standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway.
If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out the blog posts from NUUG covering the case.
