Last month, Johansen was charged by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit for a crime based on those same achievements. If this riddle seems bewildering, that's because Johansen's innovation, the decoding of digital versatile discs (DVDs), is itself a complex and unresolved issue.

Barely five years old, DVDs are becoming another subject (much like MP3s and Adobe Ebooks) of the increased scrutiny that the federal government is currently applying to piracy, whether through file-sharing or sales of pirated discs.

Compounding the problem are issues that courts must first decide. Is all copying of DVDs illegal, or is it the right of a consumer? Are the major media suing to reclaim profits or to shut down innovative technology that threatens their power?

Published and available around the world on the Internet, Johansen's DeCSS allows pirates around the world to bypass the Content Scrambling System on DVDs and copy the movies onto a hard drive. This software has found an ally in pirates in universities and large corporations that have a lot of bandwidth and can transmit the files relatively quickly.

A third-year University of California-Los Angeles political science student, who wished to remain anonymous, knows of people with quarter terabytes (250 gigabytes) of copied films and television shows. A user of the copying technology himself, he reveals how easy it is to do it.

"You can search on Yahoo or some server programs. You can probably find it on Morpheus and Hotline. A whole bunch of stuff comes up," he said.

Many of the pirates using university or corporate bandwidth share files within what is known as a "Warez" group.

Last month, two men were charged with illegally sharing information on their Warez group, "DrinkOrDie," as part of the international Operation Buccaneer, which has executed about 150 warrants to date. If indicted, the case would be a powerful precedent in the war against piracy.

While criminal litigation is definitely a possibility with illegal sales, copying material for home use and for sharing with friends is a consumer right that courts tend to favor. Meanwhile, civil litigation can flourish.

When the videocassette recorder, then in another form called BetaMax, first came out in 1979, media companies feared pirating and attempted to shut down Sony's VCR production via litigation until the Supreme Court struck them down in 1984.

Napster was deflated by the power of civil action from large record companies that demanded royalties. Now Morpheus and KaZaA, two of the top peer-to-peer servers, are being sued in the same way.

Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, believes there is a difference between DVD and MP3 piracy.

"Napster is interesting, because you have people tossing songs around. What's the value of a song versus the value of a movie that cost a hundred million dollars to make? I don't know. I'm not about to put a judgment that one is more important than the other," Mrozek said.

While Warez groups are usually nonprofit, Mrozek said that they are still under federal government attention. For those who copy and sell the pirated media, there is absolutely no recourse, especially if profits reach Napster levels.

"We will go wherever an investigation leads us. If we find out that you are illegally distributing 'Lord of the Rings' and you're charging people money and making a lot of money, we may get interested in you and send someone to look at your computer in your dorm or whatever," Mrozek said.

While tools for piracy are certainly widespread, counter-groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are fighting on behalf of the so-called "pirates," like Johansen, who may be protected by the First Amendment. In Johansen's case, he helped write the DVD decoder as part of an open-source project, Livid, that is building a DVD player for Linux systems, which has yet to be licensed by the Motion Picture Association of America's DVD arm as a player.

Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior intellectual property attorney, has a theory about why the big guns seem to be picking on Johansen, a kid who isn't pirating anything.

"If the media companies were serious about stopping the piracy, you would have expected them to actually start going after some of the pirates. Instead they've been going after the technology companies. This is not about piracy, it's about controlling new technologies that they feel threaten their business models," von Lohmann said.

The online Web journal www.2600.com recently published Johansen's code and was temporarily told to remove it from the Web site. Last November a California appellate court unanimously decided against the injunction, and the ruling is being appealed once again. Using Pentagon Papers as a precedent, EFF argued that the First Amendment allowed publication of such material as the DeCSS.

"Just because third parties that 2600.com hasn't met might download the code for unlawful purposes, that shouldn't be enough to stop the presses. You can justify almost any kind of censorship by saying that someone might misuse the information," von Lohmann said.

The real threat in all this litigation, however, is toward the consumers. While VCRs have actually helped film profits with rentals, major studios, all of whom declined to comment, still fear losing the power to determine how you watch movies, how much you pay for them every time, and how you can use the DVDs you buy.

"We have these technologies forcing us to sit through commercials on DVDs. If I want to copy the DVD in order to skip the commercials that doesn't make me a pirate. It just makes me a consumer who doesn't want to watch commercials," von Lohmann said, adding, "The copyright owners are trying to say that there's all this piracy. But their solution is to wipe out all the consumers' rights. That's going too far."