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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."
A god damn video camera or a microphone could be a piracy tool, too. This is getting ridiculous. I'm sick of people in charge that don't know anything.
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).
Ok, I am sick of this. Any Blu-ray player will play DVD movies and do a decent job of up-converting them. You do not have to buy Blu-ray disc to use a Blu-ray player. All these people bitching about "having to buy all their movies all over again" are just stupid.