Slashdot Mirror
Circuit City Ripping DVDs for Users
Grooves writes "Circuit City is offering a DVD transfer service that's sure to enrage the MPAA. For $10 for 1 DVD or $30 for 5, Circuit City will violate the DMCA and
rip commercial DVDs for users to put on their mobile players. From the article: 'This should be a viable market. Software and services are losing out to draconian digital rights management philosophies and anti-consumer technologies aimed at increasing revenues stemming from double-dipping--what I call the industry's penchant for charging twice for the same thing.' They note that fair use
backups of DVDs have not been tested in court because all of the attention is focused on the circumvention software itself." Update: 08/04 22:40 GMT by Z : Acererak writes "Red Herring reports that Circuit City isn't offering any DVD-to-DVD copying scheme. The Slashdotted sign was an isolated screwup."
And 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... *whistle and confetti!* congratulations Circuit City!!! You just got sued!
That is, unless Circuit City is giving a cut of the money to the MPAA. Thankfully Circuit City has deep pockets and good lawyers, it should be interesting to see the MPAA go up against them instead of picking on little kids.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Did some bean counter had a brain fart when performing the benefit analysis? Make gobs of money by ripping DVDS minus bigger gobs of money paying attorney fee equals a world of hurt.
I know they're just looking for another revenue stream, but its great to see big companies (even inadvertently) fighting the system on behalf of individuals rights.
They must have thought this through. You don't do something risky like this if you're a massive business. They must have talked to a lawyer and have A) a loophole, or B) a license to do this (sharing profits with MPAA?). I mean, million or billion dollar companies are careful to avoid these sorts of lawsuit-risking moves, simply because they're a huge target.
In what way would this violate the DMCA?
Since Circuit City has the software and tools to do the copy and would presumably not be handing them out to customers the standard "providing tools to circumvent copyright" issue wouldn't apply. Since backups for play on another device are fair use and legal I don't see the issue.
Obviously, since companies don't like getting sued into non-existence I suspect Circuit City feels they are on sold legal ground as well.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I wouldn't make the mistake of assuming they are 'standing up' to anyone. Either they will get sued and desist/settle, strike an arrangement to kick back to the MPAA, or get totally ignored.
It's a shame that only Circuit City is challenging the MPAA. Their offering is commercially viable. But I don't think Circuit City has the financial wherewithall to take this to its conclusion.
I would love it if some large corporations would gang up against the MPAA and RIAA. Power without challenge is a dangerous thing -- evidenced by DRM, and the litigious nature of these two agencies.
Many years ago Circuit City bravely (but foolishly) pursued the DivX versus DVD issue (the betamax vs. VHS of its time). That battle, which, if it had gone Circuit City's way, would have hurt the consumer. It's ironic now, because DivX was a kind of DRM back then. You bought a movie at a lower price but had to renew via a special player that connected to a site over a phoneline to renew your ability to watch that movie. Or, you could spend more and get "unlimited viewing" -- assuming, of course, the movie studio even offered it. From the initial releases there were only a handful of movies that could be had for "unlimited viewing."
There was a grass-roots effort to thwart this nonsense (DRM over the phone) and DVD as we know it now won the battle; only to be replaced by another DRM years later. A much more pervasive and restrictive DRM. The irony of Circuit City's current stand is thick.
This time, however, I'd back 'em up... Is someone up to the cause? Does the grass even have roots anymore? In spite of all of the podders out there, I don't think most of them have the mental fortitude to stand against the MPAA/RIAA. Are they even aware?
(objectively speaking: this could be a bad idea because you can bring in any number of iPods and copy a single movie to each of them. This, I believe, it's ethically reprehensible; it's also a major flaw behind this service.)
My ZooLoo
Not every joe sixpack is savvy enough to have backed up his DVD collection. Some of my old original disks are already failing on commercial players. (Stargate season 1, bought when it first came out, is now unplayable.)
As people find more and more of their disks failing, these services could become seriously mainstream. And at 10bucks a pop, a lucrative source of cash.
I'm quite surprised to see this coming from a major retail chain - a mom and pop computer store (yes, one of the three still in existence) I could see having a helpful staff member who was willing to "stick it to the man" and do this for people, but a major corporation making the decision to do this definitely seems to show that the lawmakers of the U.S. need to wake up and stop legislating to keep business models alive past their prime.
This is pretty interesting, especially coming from the company who was one of the original partners in DIVX...you remember, the "pay-per-view" DVD's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX. Even if they are only driven by profit, it's nice to see them take a more "consumer friendly" position.
----- Connection reset by beer
Actually, this seems to be aimed more at the true "consumer" - your thirty-something gagdet freak with his Crackberry and his video iPod who probably isn't inclined to go out and find "illegal" software to get content on his mobile devices. Remember, there are plenty of people out there who pay for VHS-to-DVD transfers.
Increased DVD sales is the only thing I can think of here... $10/movie doesn't strike me as a major profit center - you've got the cost of the equipment to offset, the customer service rep's time, and then, as others have pointed out, either lawyers or the MPAA payoff. Doesn't seem to me there's much (if any) profit for Circuit City in this. As such, I feel a need to say "Way to go!", and plan a trip to support my local Circuit City.
This
Now, what I've never understood is, if *IAA can sue a guy who rips one of their CD/DVDs for breaking their encryption, why people can't sue the NSA over breaking their encryptions on their emails without permission?
The DMCA is an unenforcible, ridiculous law that serves no purpose other than to make most honest Americans into lawbreakers.
Agreed, but Average Joe is not going to want to bother keeping up in the DRM arms race for casual pir^H^H^HFair Use purposes, and will happily pay a smart techie to do this for him, saving himself from (A) having to learn to do it himself and (B) being directly liable for breaking the DMCA.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The article we are discussing is based on ONE photograph of ONE cheesily printed DVD Copy flyer. This could be nothing more than a prank; it could be one store or department manager trying to increase sales; it could be the real thing (but I doubt it).
Has anyone checked with Circuit City to see if the speculation is grounded in reality?
I thought not.
Unless CC is using their own DVDs, it should be fine. Users can still have their 1 legal copy can't they? You bring a DVD to me, I copy it for you to YOUR mobile device, and you leave with both DVD and mobile device. What's MPAA going to do? Try to settle for $3,500? I think CC has a bit of bargaining power. I don't see MPAA pulling all DVDs from the CC shelves to 'prove a point'. I hope CC fights this, should be good times.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
As much as we all like to see companies and people stand up to the MPAA and RIAA, this may not be a good idea.
At its heart this is about a company profiting off of the removal of DRM and re-extending fair use to a product that really shouldn't have DRM on it (or so sayeth most slashdotters). What if this is discovered to be the next business model? Cripple things with DRM, and then for additional money they'll take them off?
Shutter...If only Circuit City were doing this for free.
-THE END-
I see this as a sales tool. Buy a new DVD at full price, and get a backup copy for your portable player burnt for 10 bucks. Circuit city wins, and the MPAA wins through increased sales. Have I got this wrong?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The best thing we, as consumers, can do at this point is to take Circuit City up on their offer. Use the service they're providing. If the market gets lucrative enough, the other electronics giants (Best Buy, Fryes, etc.) will want a piece of the action. At that point, none of them will want to listen to the MPAA's whining and will do everything in their power to maintain their hold on this new market.
You want a bunch of bigwig companies to gang up on the MPAA? I think this is the best way to accomplish that.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
If only Circuit City were doing this for free.
Therein lies the problem. If they were doing this for free, it *might* fall under fair use. They aren't. They are making a profit. This comes down to selling a copy in adifferent format without protections, and without any royalties.
Circuit City is going to lose their asses on this one.
If they did it for free, it would be a value-added service. No royalties to be paid. Instead, they've turned it into a money-making operation with no compensation to the copyright owners.
I agree 100% that *we* should be allowed to do this, and that CC should be allowed to do it as a value-added service, but they should *not* be able to charge for it.
Don't people get paid for "services"? I would agree had they been selling these copies to people walking down the street... But they way I understand it, the customer is coming in and saying "I need a copy" so, they SHOULD already OWN the product, they're just paying for the service of the backup/transfer... Right?
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
>I hate Best Buy and their constant nagging about buying warranties.
Constant nagging? It's pretty much an industry standard for consumer product sales nowadays, not just Best Buy.
It's a profit center, and sales people are required to make the pitch. Required to make the pitch, as in, if they don't make it, they become former employees. That job sucks to begin with, and pitching warranties and credit applications forces them to do things that they hate even more, but they do it, because a job that sucks is better than not having the job, most of the time.
They ask you if you want it, so be direct and say no, I don't want it. If they ask you again, say, no, I don't want it and if you ask me again I will not buy this.
> Of course I only bought the boom box for my beach vacation, and took it back when I got home.
You hate the pitch, and they hate the renters. You deserve each other.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The assumption keeps being made that Circuit City hasn't actually been authorized to do this.
I'd like to know where that assumption comes from.
The unauthorized circumventing of access controls isn't even just a mere civil offense, it's criminal. People can go to jail for that. Exactly why are people assuming that CC hasn't actually done their homework and at the very least got some kind of permission from the DVD-CCA to go ahead with this project. Given the prices they're charging, and the nature of the service, it looks to me like something the DVD-CCA would approve. All we have is an article from an increasingly dumber Ars Technica (they're not what they were.) which infers that they don't have permission only from the fact that the service exists.
The high expensive, and the intended use (which may even involve converting DVDs to another DRM'd format, we don't know at this stage) certainly suggests that the service wouldn't have been veto'd automatically on presentation to the DVD-CCA. And we're assuming at this stage that Circuit City aren't pointing a miniDV camera at a plasma TV.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Please, get your terminology right. Halfway through your post you switch from Macrovision, the company that provides DVD encryption, to Macromedia, the company that provides Flash. I doubt the latter has a care one way or the other in DVD protection.
It's the DMCA, not the DCMA. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not "Copyright Millennium". And, young man, it doesn't fit the music as well. "It's fun to violate the D-M-C-A!"
Finally, he didn't "give all source code to Macrovision." Ignoring the grammatical ambiguity therein, he gave rights to the code, and unfortunately had not previously licensed it under a perpetual redistribution license. If he had simply GPL'd it (or CC-SA or anything), Macrovision would've had all the source code they wanted and couldn't've done a thing about it.
This has nothing to do with whether or not they own the product. CC is making money off of someone else's product without the permission of the copyight hodler, and without compensating them.
We keep thinking like this, and soon we're going to start shutting down independent automobile repair garages, computer repair shops, plumbers, electricians, etc... everyone else who "makes money off of someone else's product without the [explicit] permission of the copyright (can we fit patents in here too?) holder.
I hate to deflate people's expectations, but this looks *very* much like one store offering this service, not a rollout of a new service across the entire Circuit City corporation.
... now. ;-)
The sole evidence Ars Technica has for this service is a photograph of a flyer! There is nothing on the Circuit City Web site about the service, nor does it look like the company issued a press release touting the new service.
More probably, this "service" was devised by some store manager too ignorant of the ways of the DMCA to understand what he was offering. S/He was just looking to bring in a few more bucks (on the other side of the same display case is another advert on a free in-house PC clinic. I bet that's not a Circuit City wide service either, just a local store initiative). I'm sure DVD ripping service will be discontinued as the minute corporate headquarters gets wind of this. Which, thanks to Slashdot, should be right about
I wouldn't blame the ill-informed Circuit City Manager, nor even Consumerist, which first posted the photo (but wouldn't provide a location interestingly enough). Ars Technica should know better though. That's just sloppy journalism.
joab
Who says they're doing it digitally? Maybe they've just connected a DVD player to a video capture card. No circumvention, because the DVD player is licensed by the DVD-CCA. No infringement, because format-shifting is protected by fair use. A small loss in quality, but if you're watching it on an iPod will you really notice the difference?
I'm not sure that your analysis is really the whole story. It wasn't just the editing that got CleanFlicks in hot water, it was the copying of an edited version. If they had just taken a VHS tape, and physically cut out offensive sections with a razor blade and spliced it back together, they would have been fine. (Actually, my understanding is that some companies did that, pre-DVD, although it's too labor-intensive to be commercially viable.) The problem was that they were editing the film and then reproducing it; even though it was 1 reproduction for every 1 original copy, and they were rendering the originals unplayable, it was still infringement. The problem stemmed from a combination of the commercial nature of the service, the fact that the edits weren't authorized, the fact that the copy could have been passed off as the 'actual movie' (i.e. someone might have watched it and not known that what they were watching was not what the director really made), and the fact that they were making unauthorized copies of the edited versions.
Copyright law is fairly vague, particularly in relation to fair use. It's difficult to look at something like CleanFlicks and say "this action right here, this is what was illegal" within the scope of their entire business practices. It was the whole procedure that was found to be infringing. If they had done the editing without reproduction (e.g. VHS splices, or the timecode based systems now in use) they probably would have been okay. But the combination of things they were doing precluded a fair use defense, and thus they lost.
Anyway, I agree with your ultimate point: Circuit City isn't going to have nearly the problem with copyright law as they're going to have with the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Frankly if they do end up in court, I think this could end up being a much more significant and interesting case than CleanFlicks was. On the scale of "bad laws," the DMCA is orders of magnitude worse than copyright law even in its current state, since it has no exemption for fair use. In the CleanFlicks case I could at least see the situation from the perspective of the studios or a copyright holder who didn't want edits being made to their stuff, but I don't think that they have any such right to dictate the format in which a viewer watches the Work. Except wherein the format it's watched in has a real impact on the artistic merits of the movie, and where the prohibition is enforced against (say) all portable players because it was designed to only be seen in IMAX theaters, that's not something that a rightsholder should be able to claim control over.
I think we're only starting to see the very beginning of the battles over the DMCA: the number of future services that are going to run afoul of it are just mind boggling; ultimately I think the consumer demand for these services is going to be so great, that if the law is not modified it's just going to be flouted by the public, leading to some Prohibition-like state where the law is so disconnected from reality that it's bordering on irrelevance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I agree Newegg rules, but sometimes you need something right away, which is why I specifically pointed out in my original post that CC is my choice for the stuff I don't buy online.
To expand on that, I probably enjoy more choice than the average person, I have a Circuit City, a Best Buy, a CompUSA and a Frys all less than 2 miles from my hourse and all within a half mile of each other (there used to be a Good Guys too before they bit the dust). Circuit City is definitely my best choice for local needs.
Keyword:
repair.
Not transform. And while you are talking *physical* property one actually owns, we're talking about *intellectual* property you've only purchased the right to personal use.
Haven't seen any quotes from Richmond so I wouldn't get to excited. Store personnel are encouraged to 'think out of the box' regarding alternative revenue streams - esp. those related to exploiting a workforce that is already in place. The signs in the picture were not sourced from corporate... not very flashy is it? For those hoping for a fight, you probably won't see one - they'll just ask the store director to pull the signs. Remember, CC is a major distributor of Hollywood movies, not because they make money on titles but because it brings in customers to buy other stuff. They will not upset their suppliers.