Slashdot Mirror
Zediva Shut Down By Federal Judge, MPAA Parties!
AlienIntelligence writes "Looks like the loophole that Zediva founded their business model on evaporated. Zediva's biggest problem was getting over a 1991 ruling against a similar method of transmitting copyright works. Zediva has vowed to appeal the ruling."
For folks who've never heard of Zediva, they apparently let customers stream newly released movies. Their business model was that the customers rent the DVD and DVD player which are both located at their facility, and the customers access them over the Internet. Clever approach, but this shutdown should be of no surprise.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Except they don't rebroadcast to multiple customers at the same time. For each person watching the DVD at a time, Zediva has one copy and one DVD player. Its almost identical to renting the physical copy of the movie, but without actually sending them the disc itself. So its nothing like broadcasting, except it occurs at a distance.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
No, not exactly. Their claim to legitimacy was that they purchased dozens of copies of each DVD, and thousands of DVD players paired to slingbox-type products. When the user rented the DVD, the DVD was loaded into a player, plugged into the internet streamer, and unicast to the subscriber. That DVD and DVD player were inaccessible to any other user during that time. It behaved just like a normal rental, except the subscriber did not have to physically go and pick up the DVD. The only real difference between this and a traditional rental service is the turnover rate per disc is much higher.