A Norwegian teenager has been charged with distributing a software programme that enables users to make unauthorised copies of DVD movies, police in Oslo said yesterday.

Mr Jon Johansen is thought to have developed a programme that breaks the copyright protection system of the DVD (digital versatile disc) system. Mr Johansen is charged with breaking intellectual property laws.

Major Hollywood studios, which use an encryption scheme on their DVDs to prevent unauthorised copying, have already taken legal action against three people in the United States who displayed Mr Johansen's programme on their websites. The programme, known as DeCSS, is thought to have been the first DVD encryption-breaking code to appear on the Internet.

DVDs store sound and pictures digitally on an optical disc with a storage capacity considerably greater than that of a regular CDROM.