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Lawsuits Force 321 Studios Out Of Business
elegie writes "321 Studios has gone out of business. Earlier, they came under fire for producing DVD disc-copying software. Specifically, it was argued by movie studios that the DVD-X Copy software and the DVD Copy Plus software violated the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) anticircumvention rules. 321 Studios argued that copying a DVD disc for personal use counted as "fair use" in terms of copyright law. The EFF has said that the closing was not surprising because of all the legal injunctions against 321 Studios."
People need to confront the DMCA, really see it for what it is. Right now, the law says "thou shalt only play the movies in the way Hollywood prescribes", but it hasn't really internalized because so many people can use unlicensed software to do things like copy DVDs, play them without commercials, etc. I think the FBI needs to really crack down on anyone who violates the DMCA, by imprisoning everyone who copies a DVD for home use, especially rich and politically connected people. We could call it the "War on Pirates", and appoint a "Piracy czar", or something similarly crazy. The public needs to be rendered totally unable to copy or play DVDs in a way of their choosing, as the law prescribes, before they will wake up and actually understand what the law prescribes. Right now there's no reason to fight the DMCA because no one knows what it really means. It's a ban on any speech which could be used to play DVDs or other media the way we want. And that's a pretty amazing thing.
To tie in to this article, I will award a Gmail invite for anyone who can prove to me that it's legal under the DMCA to stand on a street corner and recite DeCSS. It is of course illegal, which means that Free Speech is dead in America, but if you manage to prove me wrong and include an address, the invite will be on its way. Good luck!
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
There really is no need to.
there is a far superior product that is already open source. It's called DVDshrink.
anyways, Xcopy is based on all open source tools with a delphi frontend wrapped on it to hold the call-home/DRM protection they put in it.
ignore the crud from 321, download dvdshrink instead.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
DVDDecrypter or DVD Shrink. Rip and burn to ISO or another disc. I use DVD-shrink for dual layered discs and then burn the ISO with DVD Decrypter. If you have a single layer you can just use DVD Decrypter to burn the entire disc without edits.
See here for more information on DVD Shrink.
They are both free and work well.
Every user is a registered user. you had to register online to get the software to work :( Even then it never worked that well.
I wish their forums were still up so you could see all the complaints/problems people had.
Oops, I was wrong, dvdshrink is not open source but is freeware.
I am sure it is still based on already available OSS tools though. (with the mpegtools and other projects you can reproduce the exact same thing that it does)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually, DVDShrink is not open source, it is a free binary. It also utilizes the burning libraries from Nero which are definitely not free (although it does use the ones included in trial versions of Nero).
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
In France where I live, there is a special tax on tapes, CD, DVD, hard disc and maybe other media I've forget. This tax is originaly made to send some money to the artists to balance the effect of music and video piracy. :
I'm very unhappy of this thing
If you buy a CD for your own business, you pay the same tax as a pirate who copy dozens of music CD for money! And the pirate don't care paying a tax beause of piracy!
I think that the problem is in the big music and video ompany : they don't know how to keep their buisness.
Any chance they're going to release the code to their products?
The reason they went out of business is that a court issued an injunction against them. The court enjoined them from making their DVD ripper available, because the product is deemed to violate the DMCA. I think it is likely that distribution of the source code would constitute a violation of that injunction.
It would still be illegal copying, just without the added offense of circumventing the copy protection.
Anyway consumer DVD burners are incapable of writing to the portion of the disc holding the CSS keys, so there is no way for an average user to burn a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD without decrypting the data first. Commercial DVD authoring systems can do it, but they're not exactly cheap, and neither is the blank media.
You can't bit copy the "key" part of a pressed DVD, because it exists in a part of the DVD that is inaccessible to burners.
Put in another way, you can't burn a CSS-encrypted DVD yourself.
Ed.
What are they going to do to a non-existent business? Sue them?
Worse than that. Violation of an injunction is contempt of court, and willful violation could be deemed criminal contempt of court. Remember, corporations act through people, and people can be arrested, indicted, convicted, and punished. Bankruptcy and corporate status will not shield you from criminal liability.
You are wrong on both accounts. (meaning that CompUSA does indeed track your buying habits and 321 did require all customers to register).
Not true. Jon in scandanavia (yes, I'm sure they hate that term) is a happy exception (and that was largely the same issue, dvd copying). I'm sure there are lots of others, unfortunatly my trivia collector is pretty fickle about what it choooses to retain.
That's really the fundamental problem with law. Criminals will be criminals whether restricted by law or not. Law only serves to restrict people who want to be good. And by institutionalizing coersion, you make it all the easier to wield power for evil.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Encrypted Original ---DVD X-Copy---> Unencrypted Working Copy Produced.
The original encrypted copy was decrypted for the purpose of making a copy. 321 sold this software. The former is not expressly forbidden by the DMCA, the latter is.
DVD X-Copy is not illegal, nor is using it for fair use, but distributing it in any way IS illegal.
(At least, that's how I understand it).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It seems clear that personal backups are for purposes of protection in case the disk breaks, not for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. None of those provisions would protect personal backups as fair use. The law goes on to say:
On point 1, personal backups are not for nonprofit educational purposes, but rather to save money in case the disk breaks, which counts as a commercial use. On point 2, the works are typically creative, original commercial works which have the full protection of the copyright laws. On point 3, it is the entirety of the work which is copied, not just an excerpt. And on point 4, the existence of free backups would reduce re-sales of replacement disks, not to mention that it might cut into new sales if the "backups" are illicitly shared.
Based on the text of the statute, personal backups fail every test that would make them fair use. Anyone disagree?
Nero is optional. DVDShrink 3.2 released about a week ago or so can now split out an .iso into 1GB chucnks on a FAT32 partition and automatically burn with DVD Decrypter (freeware). Prior to this it could transcode to an 4.37GB .iso and burn with DVD Decrypter if you had an NTFS partition.
Bottomline is that you don't need any payware (yes it can burn with Nero or CopyToDVD) but why? DVDShrink 3.2 and the lastest DVD Decrypter are awesome especially with the new AEC algorithms that rivals if not beats Instant Copy 8.
IANAL. I am an amateur linguist and historian, and am a large fan of the works of Georges Dumezil, Edgar Polome, and Calvert Watkins. Personally, I think you are both wrong. I don't think the purpose of the legal system has ever been to protect one group or another, but is a bit more abstract than that, at least among Indo-Europeans. Elsewhere, YMMV.
When we talk about the "legal system" it seems we are talking about the framework of laws which set the ground rules for society, and the Indo-Europeans evidently had a complex structure of thought regarding the purpose of law.
If we accept the work of Georges Dumezil as strong evidence at least for an iconographic and liturgical formula which is essentially a set of three merisms (two-fold formulas relating to a higher concept), then we are left with the argument that the Indo-Europeans probably elevated the concepts of king and priest above those of war, and those of war above those of production and wealth. We see a fallen form of this in the Indian caste system today, where the Brahmans (priests) are above the Kashatrias (warriors including the king) and the Kashatrias are above the wealthy businessmen and merchants (who often have more wealth than either the king or the brahmans).
The concept of the kings and priests in traditional IE society seems to have been one of custodianship of sacred and social order. It should be noted that in many traditions, particularly the Celtic, the king was considered to be directly responsible for the production of the land, and a drought was considered to be a result of injustice or other failure on the part of the king. One wonders whether similar ideas were brought to China by the Tocharians, as they show up later in the writings of Meng Tzu.
If we extrapolate on these concepts a bit, we end up exactly where, I think, Plato was with "The Republic" where justice is defined not so much in moral terms but rather as a state dependent on the structure and function of society. In this view, laws are not there to protect any group against any other group, except as a part of their more basic function-- the development of a set of social rules which facilitate the general working together of society towards common ends. Protection of human rights is an important aspect to this, no doubt, but it to think that the protective aspect of law is its driving force in IE traditions is, I think, to put the cart before the horse.
Were these ideas in the minds of the founding fathers? I think there is a good chance that they were. These ideas regarding the nature of Justice have been well articulated by Plato, Aristotle, and others, and I am sure that the Founding Fathers were generally aware of their work, especially given the level of influence that the writings of Plato had on various schools of esoteric thought, such as the Freemasons, and it is relatively undisputed that a great many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons (as were a great many of the Red-coats too).
Even if they were not Freemasons, most of the Founding Fathers were quite learned people, and I would be very surprised of they had *not* studied the works of Plato and Aristotle on this topic.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
About a week ago I got a call from someone at 321 who told me that they were going to file for bankruptcy in a few days. They also said there was hope for me, since they hadn't written the software and were instead a licensee. I was told that a company called Xsoftware based in Germany actually wrote it and were probably going to start marketing the software again.
While I've been reading the threads saying DVD decryptor or DVDShrink is better, I think a lot of you missed the point. This was real, legit software that you could buy in a retail store and which tried in every way to preserve fair use rights. They put watermarks in and warning screens, etc. to appease the movie studios and ensure their software wouldn't be used by any serious pirates. This was for the average user who can't figure out how to rip VOBs and use DeCSS and all that. It really is a shame they went under.
One somewhat ironic aspect of this is that 321 Studios used mandatory activation to protect their software (at least with DVD XCopy Express). So if the company totally ceased operation without a successor taking over, there would be no way to install the software they've sold in the past on any new computer.
Apparently that is not the case (at least not yet). According to their FAQ, "You will be able to activate your 321 product online either through the computer where the software is installed or through another computer which is online, using a floppy disk. Telephone activation will not be available."
Terabyte storage shouldn't be that hard to arrange nowadays. From newegg.com:
5 x WD 250 GB SATA 7200 rpm ($170 ea)
5 x Kingwin KF-72 drive tray ($13 ea)
Adaptec 2810SA 8 channel SATA RAID card ($499 ouch)
Lian-Ling Case w/6 external 5.25" bays (CDR+drives) ($111)
400W CoolMax CX-400B power supply (zillion choices here, just picked one) ($38)
$1565, add the motherboard/processor combo of your choice, add RAM and a small boot drive (setup the 5 big drives as a big RAID), and whatever incidentals you need to finish it out (I'm lazy and didn't want to spend the time).
You could probably finish out this storage server for something like $2K or so using AMD proc/mb (don't need top of the line to share a big array). 5 drives gets you a useable 1 TB. 8 channel controller gives you the ability to enlarge the array at a later date if you wish (of course you had better be willing to re-encode or backup your data to do this).
Point is, it's doable for what I consider to be a reasonable price, if I was doing DVD archival. Should be fast as hell too...
Secondly, there is really no "arguably" about it -- a dd doesn't produce any unencrypted copies. It's simply recreating the cyphertext.
True enough--but here's something else to think about. If you try to copy encrypted VOBs with Windows, you get an "access denied" error; it won't even copy the ciphertext. I don't think the MPAA would have much trouble convincing a judge that going underneath the file level to the sector level is therefore circumventing an access control, regardless of whether the control model is in Windows or the disk itself. Kind of a scary thought.