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Kaleidescape CEO Speaks Out About CSS Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has an interview with Michael Malcolm, the CEO of Kaleidescape, which you might remember as the high-end DVD jukebox manufacturer that was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association for violating its CSS license.
Despite the fact that anyone who can afford a $27,000+ DVD jukebox also usually ends up buying
hundreds of movies to load onto it, the DVD-CCA wants
them to redesign the Kaleidescape to require the presence of
the physical DVD disc in the drive during authentication and playback.
Besides defeating the whole purpose of having a jukebox in the first
place (none of their jukeboxes allow for copying, streaming, or sharing
DVDs), Malcolm says he can't find any clause in their CSS license which
would require them to implement this "feature" anyway and they're about
to file a counter-action against the DVD-CCA."
Of course, this can be done at the client, by sticking a DVD in the playback client. The client, of course caches the keys extracted from that DVD, so this only has to be done once. For large numbers of DVDs on the jukebox that one wants to make accessable to a given client, just burn a CD (or DVD) with the whole set of keys that the client can cache, or explicitly push the keys to the known authenticated clients (or some desired subset thereof).
Sheesh, this isn't rocket science.
You could've hired me.
Actually, it isn't hard drive space...
The guy in the article quotes a price to store a DVD.
It is the cost of the *total* system divided by the number of DVDs it can hold.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
It isn't just storage. The one I messed around with had (I think) 3tb. It grabs and stores the cover art and some imdb-type info, and I think it suggests related selections. It is overpriced, and the size of a minifridge, but you aren't just paying for storage, I think you get a 200 disk changer and another unit that I think is for playback (as opposed to storage).
I'm sure OSS could whip up something similar, but if you are buying this you just want it to work and you want someone to yell at then you can't get the cover art for "Hope Floats"
I'd never thought about the legal aspects of it, because it seems to me like fair-use backup. The DVDs are stored encrypted, so there isn't anything amiss there.
They're outright liars.
I was one of the good number of people named in the DeCSS case. I was offering a mirror of DeCSS on my site, in the hopes that people would be inspired to build a Linux DVD player package around it (or, at a minimum, that they could have used the Windows binaries to rip DVDs and then play them under Linux).
They sent me an email saying that because I hadn't responded to their earlier email, they were taking me to court.
Only problem is... I grepped my entire mail spool forwards, backwards and sideways (I never delete mails to my home email box, except spam, and even then rarely; I like being able to search for anything I've received) and could not find any previous email.
I called them, emailed them, etc., trying to ask them why they are claiming that I received a previous email when I didn't. Naturally I got nowhere.
I ended up having to sign an agreement basically stating that I'll never license or sell CSS technology. Over a lie of theirs.
(Not like I would license or sell their shit, but a sufficiently slimy lawyer-- and they have plenty-- would be able to argue that selling a used DVD-ROM drive (or a used DVD!) on eBay violates the agreement I made with them...)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Please learn how to use links.
y /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-S tart?ProductSKU=DVPCX985V&Dept=hav&CategoryName=ha v_HiFiComponents_SuperAudioCD
Oh, wait, you did. Stupid Slashdot. You probably used the "Extrans" setting. Try "Plain Old Text" next time. Also, use "Preview".
Here is the link: http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinit