Kaleidescape Settles With DVD CCA But No Victory For DRM

An anonymous reader writes "10 years ago the copyright police at the DVD CCA sued Kaleidescape for creating movie servers that (allegedly in breach of contract) allowed customers to copy their DVDs onto a hard drive. Yesterday, a California court announced the was voluntarily dismissed. 'Kaleidescape has always maintained that the DVD CCA contracts express no such prohibitions. In any case, Kaleidescape servers make bit-for-bit copies so that the digital rights management (DRM) provisions of CSS are preserved. The legal imbroglio with the DVD CCA has forced Kaleidescape to impose burdens on its customers and its engineers while offshore companies like AnyDVD and the U.S. manufacturers that employ their legally untouchable software proceed with impunity.' Is there a broader implication for DRM? Not really."

Comments

Yet more proof

[Cryacin]

That when it comes to business in the US, it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. And if that doesn't work, offshore it!

Re:Yet more proof

[mysidia]

Offshore companies like AnyDVD are not untouchable. It's just a question of how long it takes various parties to get around to going through the extra effort of committing resources to 'touch' them.

And now that this company has been mentioned by naw in a Slashdot article, they are now a bigger target.

Re:Yet more proof

[rhodium_mir]

Government existing is only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the simply that anything exists at all. Existence makes us all slaves to reality... or at least, most of us. Reality must not, and is not authorized to, exist. I can't wait for reality to crumble apart so I can watch all the takers who have been leaching off a reality they didn't even create finally be subjected to the nonexistence they so richly deserve.

Re:Yet more proof

[mythosaz]

Yesterday, a California court announced the was voluntarily dismissed.

I believe the California court accidentally the whole thing.

Re:Yet more proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the "WTF" mod option when you need it?

Re:Yet more proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part didn't you understand?

Re:Yet more proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheers to whoever modded this insightful.

EPIC FAIL of summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Yesterday, a California court announced the was voluntarily dismissed.

*THE* was voluntarily dismissed??? Who's case was dismissed??? Who is THE? K-Scape or the DVD CCA???

Weak.

Re:EPIC FAIL of summary

[NotQuiteReal]

Depends on what the meaning of THE is.

Re:EPIC FAIL of summary

[Anonymous Coward]

For those with limited capability to fill in gaps:

The missing word is "case."

Re:EPIC FAIL of summary

[pollarda]

Yes, __ word "The" volunteered to be dismissed. __ word "The" had family problems. __ children were running wild and ___ wife was pissed. As they say, if ___ wife isn't happy then nobody is happy. Unfortunately, on __ way home, "The", was run over by a Prius. ___ police suspect that "The" didn't hear ___ car as it came around a corner and was subsequently into what can only be described as a word pancake.

Please make note of this tragedy, ___ indefinite article will be missed.

Followup: ___ judge who filed ___ dismissal committed suicide. __ suicide note said that ___ thought of writing rulings without ___ word ___ will be a royal pain in __ patootie.

Re:EPIC FAIL of summary

[GrumpySteen]

Your definition of "epic" seems to be the same as the rest of the world's definition of "mundane."

Re:EPIC FAIL of summary

[SuperGus]

Not sure what works better in the blanks... "the" or "effing"

Re:EPIC FAIL of summary

[thaylin]

more than likely the *case* was. I dont know about you, but in school they taught me how to infer certain things about a sentence.

DRM

[Travis Mansbridge]

Has DRM ever worked? One instance? I've never heard of it lasting longer than a few days.

Re:DRM

[deimios666]

The PS3 DRM took quite a while to break. Arguably because Sony allowed linux to be installed. Once they disabled that feature all hell broke loose.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. Alongside the DMCA, it keeps DVD & Blu-Ray rippers from being anywhere near as easily available to and usable by the general public as CD rippers are.
DRM isn't really about being *technically* effective. It's about being effective enough that the DMCA keeps it all underground and illegal.

Re:DRM

[SuricouRaven]

DVD rippers are trivial to use. Insert disc, run program, click 'rip.' The public doesn't use them much because of what they produce: A rather large set of VOB files. You can't even burn them to a new disc, because they are almost always dual-layer discs that won't fit on a single-layer DVD-R.

Blu-ray ripping is a rather more involved process though - you need to put some effort into that.

Re:DRM

[meerling]

Ubisofts you can't play your offline single player game unless it's in constant online contact with the mothership drm wasn't broken, for about a month I think.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Which singleplayer Ubisoft game can't I pirate? AC4 was available PDQ

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD rippers are trivial to use. Insert disc, run program, click 'rip.' The public doesn't use them much because of what they produce: A rather large set of VOB files. You can't even burn them to a new disc, because they are almost always dual-layer discs that won't fit on a single-layer DVD-R.

Blu-ray ripping is a rather more involved process though - you need to put some effort into that.

DVDFab , AnyDVD, DVD Shrink 3.2 & ImgBurn are all you need to burn to a single layer disc.

Re:DRM

[Overzeetop]

That would be 3 more programs that the typical American is willing to use to accomplish any task. Well, four actually, but I was being generous.

Re:DRM

[TheRaven64]

That depends on what you think the goal of DRM is. Has DRM prevented unauthorised copying of DVDs? No. Has it allowed the industry to retain control of the playback and stifle potentially disruptive technologies? Absolutely! Compare DVDs to CDs for this. Any computer in the last 10 years or so comes with a program that will let you put in a CD, rip it, automatically name the tracks, share them with anyone in your house, and sync them with your portable music player or mobile phone. This isn't even a one-click operation on a lot of systems: it happens automatically as soon as you insert the disc.

Now, compare that with DVDs. The DVD software that ships on commercial operating systems doesn't even allow you to skip the adverts. Doing so would violate the DVD Consortium license and playing DVDs without a license involves breaking CSS, which is covered under the DMCA and similar laws. About 10 years ago, I had an iPod with a 20GB hard disk. A ripped DVD could be compressed to about 600MB - less if you were willing to lose a bit more quality. Portable DVD players were starting to become cheap and so all of the technology existed for portable media players capable of storing 20-30 films, with an easy application for ripping DVDs and putting them on the player. Lots of people who spend a lot of time on planes or trains would have loved to buy them, but they didn't exist. In fact, they still don't exist as consumer devices.

So, looking back over the past decade, it's obvious that DRM has been a massive success. Your mistake is thinking that it's intended to stop copying, rather than stopping the emergence of products that would prove disruptive to the media industry. If they'd managed it earlier, there'd have been no iPod, no VHS, no Walkman.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

And all that DRM is moot the moment a single copy is uploaded. Are you sure there's any popular DVD that I can't just download for free with a few clicks, even on the day of release (or in many cases, sooner)? I believe my laptop is a consumer device capable of carrying and playing a nearly limitless number of movies without regard to whatever DRM was implemented originally. I fail to see how this is an "absolute" or "massive success"

Re:DRM

[NapalmV]

Cinavia. Except its effect is rather bizarre. While it doesn't prevent you from "making copies", it prevents you from playing audio of said copies on a PS3 and selected Blu-Ray players. Guess it didn't help increase Blu-Ray disk sales, but it surely helped decrease PS3 and Blu-Ray player sales.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

So, looking back over the past decade, it's obvious that DRM has been a massive success. Your mistake is thinking that it's intended to stop copying, rather than stopping the emergence of products that would prove disruptive to the media industry. If they'd managed it earlier, there'd have been no iPod, no VHS, no Walkman.

I have never owned a dvd player that honoured the no-skip directives on dvds. Heck, even the region codes won't be honoured with the dvd players giving either the ability to automatically change the region code as needed or the ability to change the region code using the remote control (albeit a bit obscure for some of the players). Our courts here in Australia have ruled that enforcing the region codes on dvds, games, etc is price discrimination and as such, any Australian is free to ignore them.
As for portable media players (pmps), where the hell have you been living if you don't think they exist as consumer devices? Any consumer electronics store here will have a range of pmps from the portable dvd players, $20 flash based media players, and even tablets can be classed as portable media players. The flash based players have been around for years and now mostly come from China with software to rip dvds, online videos and any other videos that you have to copy to the device...

Re:DRM

[Hamsterdan]

DVD Shrink can use Nero's burn engine and do it in one shot (and Nero is still included with about every burner, so that's probably what the typical user has installed)

Re:DRM

[TheRaven64]

I have never owned a dvd player that honoured the no-skip directives on dvds

Try looking at the big-name brands sometime. You've been able to get cheap Chinese players for a long time that don't honour them, but even something like Apple's DVD Player app honour them. More recent computer DVD drives enforce the region coding in hardware, so its difficult to bypass entirely in software.

As for portable media players (pmps), where the hell have you been living if you don't think they exist as consumer devices?

You missed the point. They exist now, but show me one mainstream player that comes with a trivial UI for ripping DVDs. The movie industry only allowed them once they'd set up deals with DRM'd download suppliers like the iTunes store that allow them to sell you another copy of the same movie if you want to watch it on a mobile device. There are programs (Handbrake, for example) that can rip DVDs and transcode them, but this functionality is not integrated into programs used by non-geeks.

No scheme is perfect, and they know that there will be some people who can get around it. The point is to prevent these things from becoming mass market consumer devices.

The flash based players have been around for years and now mostly come from China with software to rip dvds, online videos and any other videos that you have to copy to the device.

Really? I own a couple of tablets, but I've never seen one bundled with DVD ripping software. When I talk to non-geeks, most of them are still under the impression that ripping DVDs is something that's really hard. Can you point to a single player that:

• Comes with software (with a simple UI) for ripping DVDs and playing them on the device
• Is available in mainstream consumer electronics stores

Re:DRM

[davek]

Excellent post. Right on.

DRM has been a huge success in accomplishing what it was designed to do: NOT prevent piracy, but rather retard development, stifle innovation and new businesses and business models, and keep control of high-demand consumer products in the hands of a few individuals with infintely deep pockets.

Re:DRM

[Jason Levine]

I have a DVD ripper that produces MKV files. I then run these through a program to produce MP4 files to store on a hard drive and play through my Roku player. It's a long process (the rip usually takes about 45 minutes, the MKV->MP4 conversion takes hours) but worth it for the ease of use. And before anyone asks, I don't share out my rips, I don't rip discs I don't own, and I don't keep rips if I get rid of the original DVD disc. Also, being able to rip DVDs has increased my DVD purchasing since I can now watch the DVD content much easier.

Re:DRM

[wagnerrp]

Rippers don't produce MKV files. Rippers produce M2TS files, as that's what's on the disc. You have to remux to get MKV. You have to remux again to get MP4. Neither of which should take hours, but only as long as it takes for your hard drive to read out ~30GB, and write back that ~30GB. Generally, that should be under five minutes.

It's only a long process because the drive recognizes the disc as copyrighted content, and then goes into low speed mode to intentionally make ripping the content a painful process, under the guise that it quiets the drive during media playback. Or, you just have a slow 2x drive. In any case, it only takes ~45 minutes, as you say, and you only ever have to do it once.

Re:DRM

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Has DRM ever worked? One instance? I've never heard of it lasting longer than a few days.

Yes it has. Yes it does . Examples:
1) BluRay DRM took years to crack. Even the anti-DRM geniuses were baffled by it and especially the BD+ stuff. If I remember correctly it basically took someone to dump computer memory while playback was going on to get cracking working. Some of the experts were concerned in the early days that BD+ might not ever be cracked.
2) Cinavia is an audio watermark used on some BluRay discs. It can also be used on DVDs although the DVD specification does not require that a DVD player recognize it, so the number of DVDs that use it is very small. Currently Sony is about the only studio paranoid enough to pay the licensing cost for using it. Other Hollywood studios either don't use it at all or barely use it (1 or 2 releases to date out of their entire catalog) for the most part. Nobody uses it as much as Sony. Workarounds have been found to enable software BluRay players to play copied discs, but Cinavia itself cannot be removed without damaging the audio track in a way that many people could notice. There are no workarounds for stand alone BluRay players - if they have firmware that recognizes Cinavia, they will recognize copied discs that contain it and stop playback at some point (anywhere from immediately to approximately 10 minutes after the movie has started).
3) Apple's DRM on iTunes video still hasn't been cracked and the only way around it is to play the video and record it in real time using a streaming media recorder program.
4) I don't really keep up, but I think Windows current Windows Media DRM hasn't been cracked at all. Older versions were cracked though.
5) Netflix and some other video streaming sources use DRM that hasn't been cracked yet. Real time recording via a streaming media recorder is the only way to copy such videos.

Re:DRM

[Minwee]

You're thinking like an engineer and misunderstand what DRM is for. It just kept Kaleidescape in court for a lot longer than a few days and that was a big success.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you bother burning another disc? I already have the disc, I want to store it somewhere and not mess with it.

AnyDVD to decrypt. Handbrake to transcode.

AnyDVD just sits in the background and doesn't require me to "use" it other than to keep it up to date.

Handbrake requires me to 1) put in a disc, 2) pick the specific sequence of titles I want to transcode into a single container, 3) pick a spot on my HDD to save it and give it a name, and 4) press the "go" button. That sounds like a lot of work, but really #1 should be a given, #2 is a simple dropdown selection, #3 is a save as dialog box, and #4 is the OK button. It could be simplified down to just that, if a lot of presets were just assumed. If you can figure out how to burn a disc, you can figure out how to rip to MP4/M4V/whatever.

From there, it's a video file that my DLNA-compatible NAS can serve throughout my house, to any TV, computer, tablet, smartphone, or other device that can use DLNA, NFS, or CIFS.

The movie companies can FOADIAF if they don't like it.

Re: DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Apple's DRM on iTunes video still hasn't been cracked and the only way around it is to play the video and record it in real time using a streaming media recorder program.

It has been cracked. See Requiem.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

1) BluRay DRM took years to crack.

Most of these things that you mention didn't really need to be cracked. It was trivial to just rip them, or download a copy of a movie, etc., so not as much effort went into it.

Re:DRM

[SuricouRaven]

He is clearly describing a program that transcodes (probably to h264). You are being confused by a difference in terminology.

Re:DRM

[mythosaz]

Has DRM ever worked? One instance? I've never heard of it lasting longer than a few days.

Microsoft .DVRMS files saved on Windows Media Center devices with PlayReady.

Re:DRM

[wagnerrp]

You don't have to transcode to H264. The M2TS already contains H264 (or much less commonly, VC-1). If you want H264 in an MP4, all you have to do is remux, and that's only going to take a few minutes.

No, my confusion was when he stated 45 minutes for a rip, I assumed he was talking Bluray, and not DVD. DVD, on any halfway modern drive, should only take about 10 minutes to rip.

Re:DRM

[jedidiah]

It doesn't matter. Hollywood has still destroyed DVD and BluRay as a video distribution platform. While they have been busy suppressing the very tech that would encourage disk hoarding, streaming has come along and provided a simpler alternative. You could even view torrents as a variation on streaming services. Both involve similar alternate distribution approaches.

Hollywood slit their own throats. While they have been fighting this tech, the likes of Netflix have managed to devalue most of the stuff that people might be inclined to buy.

Rather than spend $60 or $20 on a boxed set, people will just stream stuff from Netflix for a marginal cost of ZERO.

Great job Hollywood.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

So this prevents me from obtaining a copy of any popular media how? I'm pretty sure I could get any of this stuff whether MS wants likes it or not, without having to run any of their software or hardware.

Re:DRM

[Travis Mansbridge]

These are bad distribution platforms because it doesn't make any sense in 2014 to buy a few gigabytes on a plastic disc at a brick-and-mortar store when you can download that much in a matter of minutes without ever leaving your home.

Re:DRM

[mythosaz]

Well, for starters, that wasn't the question. It was asked about the protection schemes themselves instead of the larger picture.

Further, not everything my Windows Media Center records is popular, and rarely will the downloadable/torrentable versions be as high of quality as a native capture.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never owned a dvd player that honoured the no-skip directives on dvds

Try looking at the big-name brands sometime. You've been able to get cheap Chinese players for a long time that don't honour them, but even something like Apple's DVD Player app honour them. More recent computer DVD drives enforce the region coding in hardware, so its difficult to bypass entirely in software.

Psst!

Re:DRM

[SuricouRaven]

To rip, yes. To transcode a DVD from MPEG2 to h264? Anywhere from twenty minutes to three days, depending on what settings you use.

You'd usually want to transcode a blu-ray from h264 to lower-bitrate h264 too, as a simple remux is about fifty gig.

Re:DRM

[wagnerrp]

You'd usually want to transcode a blu-ray from h264 to lower-bitrate h264 too, as a simple remux is about fifty gig.

Well, 25-30GB anyway, and you'd only want to do that if planning to use it on a mobile device where storage limits are a concern...

Re:DRM

[jedidiah]

Nonsense.

If you are willing to do the work, it still makes more sense to buy the physical product. The physical product comes with some actual property rights. Those rights in turn allow for greater availability and lower prices.

One of my more recent acquisitions i something that "expired" from my Netflix queue before I got around to watching it.

Plus you don't usually get to "download" anything. You're forced to stream it in such a way that any that you are always using up whatever bandwidth cap you may have. Then there are platform limitations (Apple and Amazon) with some services.

Anything you "own" can be taken back any time your virtual Landlord decides (Amazon again).

You're also grossly overinflating the utility of current broadband networks. Sneakernet is still far faster and has much greater aggregate bandwidth. "Downloading" is only faster in some limited "low quality" use cases.

Besides. It's 2014. You can buy physical stuff without ever leaving home. if you're really impatient you can get the $4 next day delivery.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

^this!
i'll never "buy" a downloadable movie*, as the disc will be cheaper and I can lend/resell at my leisure. plus the extras and higher bit-rate AV. what's the point in having a decent system when you stream low bit-rate stuff?



*unless it was a drm-free mkv with decent bit-rates or all-together unavailable anywhere else (including torrents)

Re:DRM

[sixsixtysix]

the drm needed to be cracked BEFORE they could be ripped and then put online for download...

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

If you count online methods, then yes there's DRM that works.

The more that resides on systems someone else controls the harder it is for you to create substitutes. Not so easy to crack and pirate World of Warcraft.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Typically there are huge problems on launch day but it really doesn't have to fail - it's often a matter of publishers/developers not scaling out enough for launch day. Maybe it's even intentional to generate some sort of media frenzy.

Time is a hard taskmaster

[countach]

So... it took 10 years for the legal system to get to this point, and even now its only over because someone gave up, not because we had judgement? Amazing.

Re:Time is a hard taskmaster

[SuricouRaven]

It happens a lot when both sides have the funds to draw things out, or when politics get involved. The civil action between Microsoft and Novel over Windows 95 only concluded this year, and the Mount Soledad cross fiasco has been going on since 1989.

The Mount Soledad case is a good example of how a case can be endlessly stalled - it's been going on so long because there is a political involvement too, which means the state and federal congress have both had to intervene. They can't overrule the constitution which poses the real issue, but they were able to use tricks like transfering ownership of the property (Three times!) in order to invalidate the case or change jurisdiction and force everyone to start over. Right now it's being delayed by inaction: The state lost the last ruling, but managed to get an stay that delays the need to implement the ruling until after they have appealed it once more - and have been writing the document to file that appeal for the last five months. So long as the paperwork isn't submitted, the case cannot progress.

Need open source Kaleidescape

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaleidescape makes XBMC look like a pretender. We need an open source alternative to it that can be based in another country.

Re:Need open source Kaleidescape

[viperidaenz]

So get off your ass and contribute to XBMC?
Oh wait, you just want free shit. You don't want to actually help anyone or expend any effort.

Re:Need open source Kaleidescape

[jedidiah]

> Kaleidescape makes XBMC look like a pretender.

How exactly?

I don't see it really.

Then again, I don't have 50K to blow on my home media setup. I expect you don't either. So what anyone here has to say on the matter is at best conjecture.

No one here is actually capable of being a K-scape user.

Re:Need open source Kaleidescape

[Anonymous Coward]

Having evaluated *many* of these sorts of programs XBMC is the best one out there. Media center was a close second (which kaleidescape based themselves on). There are fans of particular ones out there. But for flexibility and doing what you want XBMC is where it is at. MSMC could have done all of that. But they got bored because no one wanted to put their media in it. Plugins usually started at 50 and went up from there. To get all the baseline functionality of something like XBMC in MC you had to drop at least a few hundred in plugins. MS decided there was no reason to let others have all the action and now charge for it too. The downside to the MC plugins is people get bored and wander off and support is basically gone. You cant even fix it yourself.

You can do exactly what kaleidescape does with XBMC. Unfortunately it is a manual step because of the legalities that Kaleidescape had to deal with.

I basically got tired of the 'we dont support that anymore' which is why I moved to XBMC. I am looking at you netgear and dune and popcornhour.

Mission Accomplished

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, Kaleidascape is free to dominate the market for big expensive boxes that can rip and store DVDs so you don't have to dig through piles of them just to watch something when you get home from work.

Re:Mission Accomplished

[jedidiah]

In all of my years of using and seeking products of this kind, I think I have ONCE seen a similar product available for retail. It was an expensive MCE setup that included a disk jukebox.

The industry at large never really supported this concept.

K-scape has always been a product for the 1% sold on the basis of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".

Re:Mission Accomplished

[tlhIngan]

In all of my years of using and seeking products of this kind, I think I have ONCE seen a similar product available for retail. It was an expensive MCE setup that included a disk jukebox.

The industry at large never really supported this concept.

K-scape has always been a product for the 1% sold on the basis of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".

It's not even about DRM.

In the end it boiled down a simple contractual dispute - Kaleidoscope signed an agreement with the DVD CCA over CSS so their equipment could play DVDs. In that agreement, it made note of stuff that basically said you couldn't rip the discs to a hard drive and play it without the disc being present.

That's it. Nothing more.

The contention was over DRM, yes, but they were legal signatories and bound to the terms of the agreement when they signed it.

And given their market, they could've just as well easily negotiated new terms that allowed for storage of the data provided other terms were met, like requiring all images to be keyed to the specific unit. (If you can afford one of these systems, you probably won't bother trying to resell the disc).

Or they could build a hugeass disc loader at the same time. Again, you're talking about a rather expensive system to begin with - a disc carousel isn't a big deal.

DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it worked on CPPM on DVD Audio and CPRM on SD Cards, but only because nobody cared enough to break it.

DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind, they have been broken too.

Work visa

[tepples]

How should a U.S.-born U.S. citizen residing in the U.S. go about getting off his ass and qualifying for a work visa in a country where contributing to XBMC is lawful?

Re:Work visa

[whois]

I contributed a plugin to XBMC that scrapes content from a site and shows youtube videos. I'm in the US and as far as I know everything I did was legal. Technically I don't play the videos, I just hand them over to the youtube plugin.

My preference would be to show youtube ads so the site I'm showing videos for gets revenue for users of the plugin, but I think the youtube plugin automatically bypasses ads, or doesn't have provisions to play them.

Regardless, XBMC has problems that have nothing to do with playback or copyrighted video. Crashes, the fact that the whole thing is a single-tasking system which can be hung by any misbehaving plugin, the inability to integrate web content or windowed content (the latter might be a skin thing that could be feasible, but you would still be stuck with a system very much prone to crashing)

You can help the XBMC team with real problems and not worry about video playback. Technically, the DRM piece in XBMC is probably an imported ffmpeg library anyway.

Re:Work visa

[Minwee]

How should a U.S.-born U.S. citizen residing in the U.S. go about getting off his ass [...]

I think you just answered your own question.

Re:Work visa

[tepples]

Residing anywhere else requires a work visa. What specific steps should a U.S. citizen take to overcome other countries' preference for hiring their own citizens?

Re:Work visa

[Anonymous Coward]

What specific steps should a U.S. citizen take to overcome other countries' preference for hiring their own citizens?

1. Apply for a visa.
2. Wait.
3. Wait some more.
4. Either get the visa or not get the visa.

On the plus side, most countries don't make you wait ten years for their equivalent of a green card.

Re:Work visa

[Anonymous Coward]

Get work visa.
If this fails, get education and/or training. Bonus points are available for identifying desirable markets in your chosen destination. Go to 10.
If it fails many times, choose new country or new skill set. Repeat until hired or you run out of (no_country x no_skill_set).

Proofread...

[Anonymous Coward]

"a California court announced the was voluntarily dismissed"

What was voluntarily dismissed?

Re:Proofread...

[VortexCortex]

the

I'm sorry.

[Anonymous Coward]

I accidentally the summary.

I think they are wrong

[allo]

Maybe they are right, because they are not circumventing DRM.

But they are wrong with the idea of DRM. If you copy a DVD to harddisk with intact DRM and then play it, you can copy the harddisk and play the copy, too. So its circumventing DRM while keeping the DRM(-System) intact.

but is it going to stop them?

[Lead Butthead]

" Is there a broader implication for DRM? Not really."

But is it going to stop them from parading it as such? Hell no.