DeCSS haiku by the "Wall Street Journal", "San Francisco Chronicle", "Wired" and the "New York Times Magazine". DeCSS haiku DeCSS haiku is a 465-stanza haiku poem written in 2001 by American hacker Seth Schoen as part of the protest action regarding the prosecution of Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen for co-creating the DeCSS software. The poem, written in the spirit of civil disobedience against the DVD Copy Control Association, argues that "code is speech". DeCSS haiku was created in the context of a series of protests, coming from the international hacker community, against the arrest of Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, and
Haiku in English with the one-line vertical column in which Japanese haiku are often printed, was lent legitimacy principally by three people: The single-line haiku usually contains fewer than seventeen syllables. A caesura (pause) may be appropriate, dictated by sense or speech rhythm (following the traditional Japanese tradition of a break, marked by the Kireji), and usually little or no punctuation. This form was used by John Wills and, more recently, has been practiced by poets such as M. Kettner, Janice Bostok, Jim Kacian, Chris Gordon, Scott Metz, Stuart Quine, John Barlow, and many others. As the last two examples in particular illustrate,