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 Ãkokrim (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.
+