Kaleidescape Settles With DVD CCA But No Victory For DRM

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Kaleidescape Settles With DVD CCA But No Victory For DRM

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @04:11PM from the giant-waste-of-time dept.

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."

47 of 76 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Yet more proof by Cryacin · 2014-05-20 16:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

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!

--
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
1. Re:Yet more proof by mysidia · 2014-05-20 19:13 · Score: 1
  
  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.
2. Re:Yet more proof by rhodium_mir · 2014-05-20 20:09 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
3. Re:Yet more proof by mythosaz · 2014-05-21 05:10 · Score: 1
  
  Yesterday, a California court announced the was voluntarily dismissed.
  I believe the California court accidentally the whole thing.
DRM by Travis+Mansbridge · 2014-05-20 16:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Has DRM ever worked? One instance? I've never heard of it lasting longer than a few days.
1. Re:DRM by deimios666 · 2014-05-20 17:47 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  I think, therefore you are.
2. Re:DRM by SuricouRaven · 2014-05-20 18:24 · Score: 2
  
  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.
3. Re:DRM by meerling · 2014-05-20 18:53 · Score: 1
  
  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.
4. Re:DRM by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-20 20:24 · Score: 1
  
  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.
5. Re:DRM by Overzeetop · 2014-05-20 22:19 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
6. Re:DRM by TheRaven64 · 2014-05-20 22:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
7. Re:DRM by NapalmV · 2014-05-20 23:22 · Score: 1
  
  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.
8. Re:DRM by Hamsterdan · 2014-05-21 00:07 · Score: 1
  
  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)
  
  --
  I've got better things to do tonight than die.
9. Re:DRM by TheRaven64 · 2014-05-21 00:24 · Score: 3, Insightful
  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
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
10. Re:DRM by davek · 2014-05-21 00:55 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
11. Re:DRM by Jason+Levine · 2014-05-21 01:11 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
12. Re:DRM by wagnerrp · 2014-05-21 01:30 · Score: 1
  
  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.
13. Re:DRM by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve · 2014-05-21 02:16 · Score: 1
  
  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.
14. Re:DRM by Minwee · 2014-05-21 02:16 · Score: 1
  
  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.
15. Re:DRM by SuricouRaven · 2014-05-21 05:01 · Score: 1
  
  He is clearly describing a program that transcodes (probably to h264). You are being confused by a difference in terminology.
16. Re:DRM by mythosaz · 2014-05-21 05:14 · Score: 1
  
  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.
17. Re:DRM by wagnerrp · 2014-05-21 05:36 · Score: 1
  
  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.
18. Re:DRM by jedidiah · 2014-05-21 05:59 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
19. Re:DRM by Travis+Mansbridge · 2014-05-21 06:41 · Score: 1
  
  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.
20. Re:DRM by mythosaz · 2014-05-21 08:16 · Score: 1
  
  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.
21. Re:DRM by SuricouRaven · 2014-05-21 10:26 · Score: 1
  
  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.
22. Re:DRM by wagnerrp · 2014-05-21 11:22 · Score: 1
  
  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...
23. Re:DRM by jedidiah · 2014-05-21 12:22 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
24. Re:DRM by sixsixtysix · 2014-05-21 14:02 · Score: 1
  
  the drm needed to be cracked BEFORE they could be ripped and then put online for download...
  
  --
  ...
Re:EPIC FAIL of summary by NotQuiteReal · 2014-05-20 16:37 · Score: 1

Depends on what the meaning of THE is.

--
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Time is a hard taskmaster by countach · 2014-05-20 16:39 · Score: 2

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.
1. Re:Time is a hard taskmaster by SuricouRaven · 2014-05-20 18:32 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
Re:Need open source Kaleidescape by viperidaenz · 2014-05-20 17:25 · Score: 2

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.
Work visa by tepples · 2014-05-20 17:48 · Score: 2

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?
1. Re:Work visa by whois · 2014-05-20 19:29 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
2. Re:Work visa by Minwee · 2014-05-21 02:22 · Score: 1
  
  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.
3. Re:Work visa by tepples · 2014-05-21 02:35 · Score: 1
  
  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:EPIC FAIL of summary by pollarda · 2014-05-20 18:26 · Score: 1

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:Proofread... by VortexCortex · 2014-05-20 21:46 · Score: 2

the
Re:EPIC FAIL of summary by GrumpySteen · 2014-05-20 23:56 · Score: 1

Your definition of "epic" seems to be the same as the rest of the world's definition of "mundane."
Re:Need open source Kaleidescape by jedidiah · 2014-05-21 00:14 · Score: 1

> 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.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:EPIC FAIL of summary by SuperGus · 2014-05-21 00:20 · Score: 1

Not sure what works better in the blanks... "the" or "effing"
Re:Mission Accomplished by jedidiah · 2014-05-21 00:30 · Score: 1

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".

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:EPIC FAIL of summary by thaylin · 2014-05-21 00:47 · Score: 1

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.

--
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Re:Mission Accomplished by tlhIngan · 2014-05-21 03:14 · Score: 1

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.
I think they are wrong by allo · 2014-05-22 05:38 · Score: 1

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? by Lead+Butthead · 2014-05-22 08:29 · Score: 1

" Is there a broader implication for DRM? Not really."
But is it going to stop them from parading it as such? Hell no.

--
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?