DVD Copyright Case Mulled over by Judge

howhardcanitbetocrea writes "news.com is reporting that the judge in a closely watched lawsuit challenging the legality of DVD-copying software said she was 'substantially persuaded' by past court rulings that favored copyright holders, but closed a hearing Thursday without issuing a ruling in the case." This is a case that could very well determine the future of the DMCA, and the article does a good job of summarizing the arguments from both sides.

Comments

The Judge should be persuaded by

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony v. Universal. If it's good enough for the Supreme Court...

DVD X Copy

[swtaarrs]

I've seen DVD X Copy at stores, and it has false claims on the box. It claims to copy the whole dvd onto one dvd-r, which is impossible for many commercial movies. Dvd-r's are single layered and only 4.7Gb(4.5 usable), but many(most?) professional movies are on double layer discs which hold twice that, therefore not fitting on a single dvd-r.

Re:DVD X Copy

[Stigmata669]

Many movies that are recorded onto dual layer disks do not actually require the space for the film, but rather are recorded on dual layer disks for the inclusion of extra features and other IMHO useless bits. With the right software (i've used Dvd2One) you can take the contents of dual layer disks and remove the extras to put a full bandwidth film on a single dvd-r, or sample down the mpeg-2 bitrate to fit a long movie on a single dvd-r.

Re:This is nice

[Timesprout]

eh not really. The judge has already admitted
"I am substantially persuaded by them," she told both sides.
referring to previous decisions in favour of copyright holders in similar cases.

Don't use DVD X Copy... Use one of these instead:

[diatonic]

There are thre software packages currently available to copy a full DVD9 disc to DVD5. All three will resample the video to fit on a single layer recordable DVD.

DVD2One is incredible fast, and gives the option of 'Movie Only' stripping menus and extras, or 'Entire Disc'. It can process an entire 8GB DVD in about 25 minutes on my 1.4 GHz T-bird.

DVD 95 Copy will preseve entire disc stucture (resampling video and giving option of discarding unwanted audio) Takes about 2-3 hours to process.

Pinnacle Instant Copy will also preserve entire disc. Takes about 4 hours to process disc.

Hope this helps,
.:diatonic:.

Re:Possible inconsistent interpretation of the law

[Anonymous Coward]

one please explain to me how the VCR is any different?

Encryption and the DMCA. If DVD's weren't encrypted this wouldn't even be an issue.

Re:This is nice

[Anonymous Coward]

eh not really. The judge has already admitted "I am substantially persuaded by them," she told both sides. referring to previous decisions in favour of copyright holders in similar cases.

She was referring to Universal v 2600 which favored the copyright holders, and US v Elcomsoft which favored fair use.

Re:Backups as fair use?

[Drachemorder]

"If you buy a can opener and it breaks, do you expect to get another can opener for free"

A can opener or a book is a physical item. When you buy a can opener, you're buying one can opener. You actually posses that item. This is not so with DVDs, according to the MPAA and their cronies: instead, you are buying the right to watch the movie contained in that DVD. Therefore it's reasonable to claim that this right persists regardless of what happens to the physical medium the movie is contained on.

The movie is an abstract concept (i.e. "intellectual property"); the can opener is a physical item. The two are inherently different.

Re:circumventing protection != circumvnent copyrig

[Art Tatum]

Actually, the DMCA only makes it illegal to circumvent access protection--not copy protection. The reasoning for this was really twisted.

Originally, the copyright industry wanted a law that restricted acts of circumvention (with no distinction about what kind of circumvention it was). Defenders of fair use complained, stating that excerpts could not be made for commentary if it were impossible to copy portions of a work.

The legislature decided that protection schemes that prevented copying of material would violate the fair use doctrine and would not be specially protected by law. Instead, copyright holders would be granted legal recourse in case of a breached access protection scheme.

This is convoluted, of course, since you can't copy something if you can't access it. But legislators never seemed to get that far in their reasoning.

Re:circumventing protection != circumvnent copyrig

[Anonymous Coward]

If you guys REALLY want to have a mind bender the judge is mulling over the fact that the DMCA might be unconstitutional due to the fact that it denies access to works even AFTER the copywrites expire. Here is the la times article on it.

Re:circumventing protection != circumvnent copyrig

[the_2nd_coming]

district and circut court judges are bound by the law and the supreme court rulings. there is no ruling on the DMCA v. fair use yet from the top 9 but there is a law and based on that the judge must rule in favor of copyright holders. this case however will not be the end as an injunction to the ruling will be given while the losing party gets an appeal and then another injunction or a hold will be granted pending the acceptance of and ruling on the case by the supreme court.

Re:stupid

[aralin]

You cannot make an encrypted disk, because your DVD-R player cannot write into the track 0 to write the CSS keys. So in order to copy the DVD you have to decrypt it.

Major Omission !! This DVD9-DVD5 tool is free.

[deathcow]

And it's awesome! DVDshrink allows you to set the compression levels on every single extra/menu/video stream individually.

It's fast like DVD2ONE...

Guide to DVDshrink