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!

DRM

[Travis Mansbridge]

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

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: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.