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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.
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.
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.
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.