Judge Opens Hearing On RealDVD Legal Battle 164
FP writes "On Friday morning, lawyers urged a federal judge to bar RealNetworks from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool. RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and is a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased. This legal battle began with a restraining order last October which stopped the sale of RealDVD. More coverage is available at NPR. The same judge who shut down Napster is presiding over the three-day trial."
Reader IonOtter points out that later in the day, Judge Patel sealed the court after DVD Copy Control Association lawyers "argued that public testimony of aspects of the CSS copy-control technology would violate trade secrets."
Backup? (Score:2, Interesting)
The same judge who shut down Napster is presiding (Score:5, Interesting)
DVDs are obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently I was looking at purchasing DVDs of a long-running TV series. I realized that the DVDs with all of their cases would take up a HUGE amount of space! I always watch DVDs via my computer, I don't even own a regular DVD player. Then I realized I actually DON'T WANT physical DVDs! I have enough storage space I could put this huge pile of DVDs on a single hard drive - without even compressing them further.
* All I want is a file I can double click on, sit back, and watch. *
Where can I pay for a licensed download of this kind of stuff? Oh, pretty much nowhere? And, no to work for me it can't be DRMed and must be in a relatively standard codec.
Now, if I could buy a plain DVD with such a file that I could drag-and-drop to my hard drive, and then dispose of the DVD or toss the plain DVD on to a spool somewhere that would be fine too. That might save me from tying up my internet connection for a while. I don't want to have to search through a pile of DVDs to find the one I want.
Technically it is possible to copy DVDs to a hard drive but as everyone here knows that is forbidden by a truckload of laws!!! W... T... F...?!!!!! Not to mention most DVDs are encrypted and many DVDs are damaged in creative ways to try to prevent people from copying them.
If they are so freaking afraid of piracy, they should drop the price enough and make it so it was actually more convenient and desirable to purchase a DVD, then the MPAA could just sit back and watch the torrents dry up!
Oh, and should I mention how painful dealing with most regular DVDs are? Put in the DVD and be forced to watch a dozen commercials for crap? Every time I buy a DVD I feel like I am begin fucked up the ass by Micky Mouse!
So why do I even want a physical MPAA-pressed DVD again? Just sell me what I want dammit!
Re:Betamax Redux (Score:5, Interesting)
The same could be said of the automobile, the airplane, and the internet. Imagine carriage, railroad, and telephone industries with today's level of lobbying and corruption opposing these industry-wrecking technologies.
Let's not forget that book publishers (whom we all revere, right?) long ago lobbied against the idea of public libraries because "pirates" would read their wares without paying for them. Even Ben Franklin, deemed the father of the American public library system, established a "subscription library" where you had to pay something to play.
Then there's the famous Jack "The Asshole" Valenti, who, when the idea of movies on TV was first proposed, shrieked, "But ... but ... but what if a television set owner invites a neighbor over to view the movie for free !?!?!?!"
Re:You think the judge read that book? (Score:3, Interesting)
This paper wasn't that obscure. "Among other things, the paper concludes that the State Farm/Gore due process test is applicable to statutory damage awards under the Copyright Act, a position which is consistent with the position taken in the amicus curiae brief filed by the Free Software Foundation in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, and inconsistent with the positions taken by the Department of Justice in Tenenbaum and in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud"
However, I believe I may be in error about what the point of view of those authors was on the Napster case. Perhaps I confused that with the Mp3DotCom case. There you go - they withdrew their paper from free public access and now I can't read it to check my facts! The Mp3DotCom case was sited as an example of a grossly excessive award against defendants in the name of protecting copyrights, a (potentially) $118 million award was made against mp3.com, even though there was no discussion or proof of damages to the copyright owner and no evidense of profit derived from the use of the copyrighted goods on the part of Mp3.com. (The judge was prepared to impose over $118 million but Mp3.com was able to reach a settlement with UMG Recordings for $53.4 million)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
They believe that the only legitimate way to view a DVD is to have the physical disk available and inserted into a hardware device that will read it and output the contents on a display.
I think you're still right here, but only just - the tipping point is not that far out. I'm surprised by how many Just Plain Folks ask me, or people around me, about watching television on-line, or about 'DVD' players that will let them play 'computer movies' (e.g. avi's), and other questions about getting/watching movies outside the mainstream 'Buy it at Blockbuster' approach.
An individual - who has heretofore, to the best of my knowledge, just used her home desktop for surfing, webmail, and playing some mp3's- asked me this week how she could use her big-ass LCD TV as a computer monitor. When I asked why she thought they wanted to do that, she said that she'd been watching movies on her computer, but wanted to be able to sit on the couch w/ her husband/boyfriend and watch it from there instead of sitting in front of her 19" LCD monitor.
This next part, I *swear* is the truth ... absolutely no BS or writer's embellishment. My mother - in her 70's, friends - has been given a few burned DVD's with avi's on them (it started with An Inconvenient Truth). I'm guessing that someone's grandson or granddaughter is hooking someone up, and now mine has got me burning Oprah stuff for her friends without broadband. I tell you that once my Mom and her cronies start trading media outside the Hollywood model, it's *got* to be the beginning of the end.
I suppose that some actuary has figured out that it is still worthwhile to litigate against DVD copying, but I think it is a fast-shrinking piece of the pie. Or the denial just runs way too deep.
Re:Betamax Redux (Score:4, Interesting)
OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
Are there any good open-source progs with the same functionality as RealDVD? Let's spread that around and watch the MPAA try to play whack-a-mole.
Re:DVDs are obsolete (Score:3, Interesting)
For me, the point is moot. I'm barely interested in watching TV as it is. By the time this issue is settled, there will not be any content on TV worth watching, let alone recording.
I don't own any DVDs. I have not bought a music CD in at least 8 years.
BFD.
"backing up" rentals is seriously stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you really did have an unlimited blockbuster or netflix account, you'd have long since realized that even at $1 apiece, it's just not worth it to "back up" your rentals.
$17 per month, (which fluctuates, but the deal keeps getting better so far), you can watch 3 films at a time, and reasonably expect to get 3 per week. If you're super diligent, you could watch more, but let's just go with about 14 films per month for the sake of argument.
Are you really going to watch all 14 multiple times?
Further, keep in mind that your media costs would be almost as much as your monthly netflix cost. Every month of "backups" could be spent instead on nearly an additional month of netflix service. And it would be more than an month when you factor in opportunity cost over the long-term.
An additional month where you could re-watch any of the films you've already watched, or any of the films offered that you haven't yet watched. Or the same films, but in a more advanced format than you had the first time around.
Re:Not a piracy tool? (Score:2, Interesting)
In your scenario you didn't PAY for the right to rip your friend's DVD; furthermore, he's actually NOT entitled under Fair Use to SHARE that DVD with you, for free or otherwise - it's simply a law they have no means of enforcing.
As for not holding up in court - it has held up in court many times; people who've brought recording devices to live performances have been ejected or arrested and tried and let go. The show operators DO still have the "Right to refuse service" to anyone; based on that, they are allowed to eject you from a performance if you are caught trying to record it and they've informed you that recording is prohibited. However, there have been cases where such recordings were not confiscated as there was no evidence of any intent to distribute.
You are still thinking in terms of Pay for Play; the rental company can't limit how many times you play that rented DVD in the time you have it rented either - Be it one time or twelve, you are only limited by the physical media and time available.
The renter of that DVD paid for the right to view it and the DVD producer got some portion of that payment; whether they like the amount they got paid or not, they have been paid. They want to prevent that, they can stop selling discs to rental companies. Remember; most copyright laws out there were written by MPAA/RIAA lawyers (or equivalent) and seek to circumvent Fair Use. The EXISTENCE of laws prohibiting the circumvention of anti-copy processes are actually a violation of the Fair Use Act in themselves; they've been fighting that one since the days of MacroVision.
I for one tend to want to err on the side of everyday users in interpreting those laws & how they play out against each other; for all the squealing those Big Piggies make about the "loss of revenue for the poor, starving performers" they've shown time and again that all they're really interested in is preserving the system whereby they get to make 99% of the profit for mostly being leeches.
mnem
I'm NOT a grunion!
Re:sign of the apocalypse... (Score:1, Interesting)
I can count how many times I've rooted for Real on a one-bit integer. Yesterday, I didn't even need that.
What does this even mean? I guess it means you aren't rooting for Real.
Well, you damn fucking well should.
RealNetworks are the good guys here. They are trying to make DVDs more convenient and useful, and they fucking bent over backwards trying to make this thing be totally obviously not a piracy tool. If RealDVD cannot win this court case, that means no-one will be able to do anything, no matter how fair use it is, without the permission of the big movie studios and organisations like MPAA.
Why does RealDVD encrypt the saved DVD images? So it won't be a useful piracy tool. And because Kaleidescape [engadgethd.com] encrypt their saved DVD images, and that may have helped them to win their case [cepro.com].
I've actually had a chance to see RealDVD and it's a good program [technologizer.com]. It's actually kind of Apple-like, in that it does one thing well and does it pretty. I'd buy it for my Grandmother to use.
So, I'm rooting for RealNetworks on this one and you should too.
Re:iTunes (Score:3, Interesting)
The DMCA doesn't specify encryption, it specifies 'effective copy protection'. Contrary to popular belief, CDs do have copy protection. Every CD has two flags. One indicates that it is a copyrighted work, the other indicates that it is a copy. A conforming implementation may only make digital[1] copies of works which are either not copyrighted or are copyrighted by are not themselves copies (to allow you to make mix-CDs, but not copies of them), and must set the copy flag on any copy they make. It is fairly easy to argue that the copy protection on CDs is not effective, because very few things have respected it since the early '90s (I do recall the first CD ripper I used needed an extra command-line option to be provided to override copy protection).
DVDs have CSS, but CSS has been shown to be cryptographically weak. You can crack it on a modern computer in a few seconds, even if you don't already have a working key (which is easy to find now). Bypassing CSS is marginally harder than bypassing CDDA copy protection. To use the DMCA, they need to demonstrate that CSS still counts as effective copy protection.
That said, they may not need to use the DMCA. There may be patents that they are infringing that are only licensed to people who agree to implement the entire DVD spec, for example.
[1] Analogue copies are still allowed. I recall one early CD copier having a pair of a high-resolution DAC and ADC which it switched into the circuit for making copies of copies. That close together, the signal was usually unchanged after the digital to analogue to digital conversion.
Re:"backing up" rentals is seriously stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
Useless? It's the war on consumers and progress. (Score:4, Interesting)
You really don't get why they bother? If it became legal to move DVD images around -- even if restricted by CSS licenses, $30K jukeboxes that was introduced as new, high-end consumer "tech" and [engadget.com] discussed, here, on /. [slashdot.org] OVER 4 years ago.
If the content-control mafia doesn't go on the warpath against every possible consumer aid, then consumers might get "convenient" access to the videos they purchase. It has nothing to do with piracy -- since that's done on a massive scale across the world where DVD's are duplicated and sold for a few-bucks -- it has everything with consumer control -- especially control of the lucrative US-consumer market. If they don't keep up the legal pressure to block all technical progress, you'd start seeing low-end, non-Windows (or non-Vista) based jukeboxes selling at Walmart for $200. The content industry didn't invest millions in getting Vista to have all their layers of protection and licensing only to let stupid consumers get devices that actually allow them to DO things with their purchased videos. The only way the content-mafia can continue to make higher and higher profits off of fewer and fewer hits, is by changing the way they do business -- instead of selling DVD's, they really would prefer to sell pay-per-view-per-viewer. That would be their "ideal", though to get there, they have to move very slowly and indirectly. If they bring the consumers to a boil too quickly then the consumers get upset and balk (DIVX), or complain to congress-critters who occasionally threaten to do things [wired.com] when these content-kings try step up their charges for content viewing too quickly [chrisdottodd.com].
Just like Kaleidescape got nailed because they were a bunch of engineers and not part of the 'content-mafia', and thought consumers (even though they'd pay dearly for the cutting edge) might enjoy increased convenience. It's very likely, that Real Networks, being a competitor of Microsoft, hasn't been given the green light to develop a sufficiently onerous DRM (their RealDVD product probably isn't restricted to Vista) that's tied in with the OS, and designed to work with content-controlled hardware on the user's PC (the TPM chip being installed in every consumer computer that will be able to hold appropriately blessed, time limited, or location limited, or view-limited licenses that can be easily 'lost', or remotely deactivated over the network connection that's required for these devices to 'verify' your 'license' every time you view content.
Of course knowing what you are watching, where and how many times you watch an old DVD will given them useful marketing and taste information about the consumers who will be monitored.
Allowing a 'rogue' program that just lets consumers 'view' their own video (DVD/BluRay) without all the content-restriction and obfuscation software might allow a user to view a video through a unlicensed or non-approved video playback device. Recently I needed to replace a simple DVD player in my bedroom -- only needed an inexpensive playback device, but the device, of course has up-sampling and high-end digital-output for digital screens (LCD/plasma, virtually all modern viewers) that is only available through the HDMI connector. The instruction book tells you that unless your HDMI monitor is also HDCP-secure, that 'snow' or 'noise' in the output picture is "normal".
If the content-mafia allowed even the smallest bit of 'freedom' in video viewing, it could undo all their plans to shift to a completely controlled digital experience.
Nightmare scenario for them. Customer could buy their video *once*, DVD/BluRay, then load it on their home media center. But that same media center could show the vid