Judge Opens Hearing On RealDVD Legal Battle

FP writes "On Friday morning, lawyers urged a federal judge to bar RealNetworks from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool. RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and is a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased. This legal battle began with a restraining order last October which stopped the sale of RealDVD. More coverage is available at NPR. The same judge who shut down Napster is presiding over the three-day trial." Reader IonOtter points out that later in the day, Judge Patel sealed the court after DVD Copy Control Association lawyers "argued that public testimony of aspects of the CSS copy-control technology would violate trade secrets."

Comments

Betamax Redux

[Adrian Lopez]

Had the VCR been invented in a copyright climate like today's, would it ever have survived the legal attack against it?

I'm trying to figure out what's different, other than the fact we now have the DMCA.

Re:Betamax Redux

[Colonel Korn]

Had the VCR been invented in a copyright climate like today's, would it ever have survived the legal attack against it?

I'm trying to figure out what's different, other than the fact we now have the DMCA.

The same could be said of the automobile, the airplane, and the internet. Imagine carriage, railroad, and telephone industries with today's level of lobbying and corruption opposing these industry-wrecking technologies.

Re:Betamax Redux

[Gonarat]

But for the wisdom of a few Supremes back in the 1980's, the VCR could have been made illegal. Fortunately, fair use prevailed that time.

This is so stupid, it is time for the Entertainment Industry to grow up and accept that people want equipment like this. Make Real's implementation illegal, and the "illegal" versions will get that much more popular. They already are easier to use and have more (and better) functionality. The MPAA (and RIAA) want total control, but end up losing more control every time they win one of these cases.

Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I honestly don't understand. What do they hope to gain by stopping Real?

CSS is broken, in the face, with extreme prejudice. Game over, no victory possible. Free ripping tools are everywhere, if you know(or have that geek guy who knows) where to look. Pirate rips are similarly common. Real's software, by contrast, is insanely restrictive. It is probably harder to pirate a rip made with it than it is to just re-rip the DVD with something civilized. Why would they attack it?

No actual pirate would use it, so taking it off the market is wholly irrelevant to that. Further, by virtue of existing, being under the brand of a company with significant brand awareness, pagerank, etc. it is likely to be the first thing a n00b who wants to put some DVDs on his laptop is going to find. In that respect, it likely serves as a damper to further piracy. If the first thing that comes up when you google "transfer DVD computer" is Real's easy to use, legitimate(to the n00b) looking, and highly restrictive program, the unskilled will probably stop there. This will keep them, in at least some cases, from digging further and coming up with proper techniques.

So that is why I don't understand. This software is of zero use to pirates, who already have better, and might well actually stop n00bs from becoming pirates, by virtue of being easier and almost good enough. Is this just stupidity? A matter of principle? A concern over precedent? Are they trying to maintain the illusion among the public that DVDs cannot be ripped?

Re:Why?

[AnotherBlackHat]

No actual pirate would use it...

Piracy?
Maybe what they want is to stop people from being able to play their DVDs without restrictions.
In other words, it's about controlling what you watch, and how you watch it.

Re:Why?

[davester666]

Right now, most 'regular' people [that is, people who have never heard of slashdot], still believe DVD's are one-shot deals. If they are lost, scratched, broken, whatever, they believe their only remedy is to purchase another disc. They believe that the only legitimate way to view a DVD is to have the physical disk available and inserted into a hardware device that will read it and output the contents on a display. That if the display they want to view a movie they have on DVD can't be connected to a DVD player, they need to purchase another copy of the movie, in a format that is locked to a small range of devices that includes the desired display.

This makes the big media companies lots of profit through repurchase of DVD's (due to loss or damage) and people repurchasing the same movie in new formats (vhs&dvd, now dvd&blu-ray&a whole variety of DRM'ed formats over the internet, UMD, etc).

If Real wins, then they get to advertise widely that consumers don't have to keep repurchasing the same movie over and over again, just because Sally happened to scratch the DVD, or because you want to watch the movie during a airline flight on your iPhone.

And consumers will expect to be able to do the same thing with their new, more expensive BluRay discs as well.

Right now, most consumers aren't asking "why can't we do all these things with the discs we purchased".
If Real can crack the dam, the big media companies know that it won't be too long before consumers do, because it will become plain to consumers that they have the right to do these things, but that the big media companies are contractually preventing them from being able to exercise that right (the contracts being between the format/movie licensing company's owned by the big media companies and the format-playing hardware and software companies licensing the formats/movies.

Re:Why?

[hedwards]

No, the law's just fine it just needs to be properly interpreted. DVDs do not contain copyprotection, end of story. CSS does not in any way shape or form deter people from copying.

What DVDs do contain is technology that prevents them from being run on devices that are not authorized to do so. That is _not_ copy protection unless the authorization is on a per device basis.

Removing CSS is not a violation of law anyways, because it isn't effective and one has the right to circumvent copyprotection under the DMCA.

iTunes

[patternmatch]

If RealDVD is a piracy tool, then so is iTunes (or anything else that allows you to rip CDs).

Re:iTunes

[corsec67]

CDs aren't encrypted, which changes the legal meaning significantly.

It doesn't matter if that encryption is pathetic, it just matters that it exists.

You think the judge read that book?

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt he even knows it exists. It's even more doubtful that he has any misgivings about his ruling in the Napster case other than telling his golf buddies recently, "Fuck it, I shoulda added 'Throw dirty little pirate punk in overseas prison for terrorists if we ever build one!" to the sentence."

Just because we have an orgasm about every obscure paper published that attacks current copyright law, it doesn't mean anybody else ever notices those papers. Even if they did notice, they couldn't care less about them.

Re:If everybody knows it

[dgatwood]

I'm glad you pointed that out. This decision is legally indefensible and utterly inexcusable. One of the key requirements for something being a trade secret is that it must, in fact, still be a secret. Once knowledge enters into public knowledge through reverse engineering, it is no longer secret, and is no longer legally eligible for trade secret protection.

The disturbing thing is that this is a critical case as far as defining the boundaries for the DMCA and reverse engineering, fair use rights, etc., but because those devious lawyers from the DVD CCA got their way, a significant portion of this important case will be stricken from the public record. This is, of course, what they want. This has nothing to do with protecting any trade secrets and everything to do with hiding their smoke and mirrors from licensees in the hope that they'll keep buying the snake oil^W^WDRM.

Unfortunately, sealing a case like this also does a very serious disservice to the public in this case, and I hope that the EFF and other organizations are taking steps to get this case unsealed again. It is the American people's right to know what is going on behind closed doors in cases dealing with our fundamental fair use rights.