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Film Studios Sue Samsung Over DVD players

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the day-late-and-a-dollar-short dept.

Lam1969 writes "The Korea Times reports that five U.S. film studios have taken Samsung to court for selling DVD players which allow users to bypass DRM features. The film companies, including Walt Disney and Time Warner, are demanding Samsung recall the players. According to a Samsung spokesman quoted in the article, the movie studios probably 'take issue' with Samsung's HD841 model, which Samsung sold in the United States for five months in 2004."

3 of 567 comments (clear)

  1. movie industry list $5.4bn? by linuxhansl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry lost $5.4 billion last year due to piracy.

    $5.400.000.000?! I sure would like to see the math behind this estimation. It's probably the old non-sensical #copied movie * $$/movie. Let's say the average DVD price is around $20, that means 270.000.000 movies have been copied? Yeah right!

    And it assumes:

    1. All of the people who pirated a movie would have bought otherwise.
    2. None of the people who pirated later went and bought the movie.

    I'm getting quite tired of these MPAA calculations.

    The opposed feature in these players is most likely the ability to disable the country-code in these players (via a hidden menu) so that non-US DVDs - in fact all DVDs - can be played in the players. I for one never understood why I shouldn't be able to watch DVDs that I bought in Europe because I *cannot* get them here.

    Oh well... In the end the MPAA will succeed convincing enough politicians who will pass more and more stringent laws, copyright will be extended to 500 years, and in a decade or so the movie industry will be facing bancruptcy and wondering why nobody is buying their super-duper-extra-high-definition-drm-secured-DVDs -of-dumb-holywood-crap anymore.

    As I mentioned somewhere before: Instead of land-owners and peasants without rights and property we'll have information-owners and rightless masses of consumers... Information-Feudalism.

  2. Explaining DRM to a 2 year old by daBass · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My brother was recently forced to copy a DVD. It was a very cheap children's DVD his son loves. The problem? There was a 2 and a half minute non-skipable copyright notice before the main feature.

    You try explaining that one to a 2 year old...

  3. What about current models? by Munchr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why sue over a player that hasn't been comercially available for over a year? If they're going to sue over an unlockable player, why not sue Philips over the DVP642 which is still on the market and is region and macrovision unlockable through hidden menus. Or sue a company like Apex which has consistantly released an unlockable model, quickly followed by a "corrected" player, over and over again?