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Author
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Topic: Judge Rules DVD-copying software illegal
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Joe Schmidt
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 172
From: Billings, Montana, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-21-2004 07:27 PM
The following article is quoted from the New York Times, 2/20/04. I agree with the comment that this issue will ultimately need to be settled by the Supreme Court, if the Court continues to uphold the precedents laid down the the Betamax case of 1984. Software to back up the content of a DVD has many legitimate uses that do not infringe copyrights. This is the heart of the matter. If the film studios do not want their DVDs copied, they have to develop technology to prevent same, and since as each wall is built someone usually comes along with a higher ladder, from time to time they will need to revise their technology. They should not be sending Mr. Valenti in his limousine to Washington carrying bags and bags of money to purchase more laws. [oops, sorry, "political contributions."]
Here's the article.
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John Borland, Staff Writer, CNET News.com
After eight months of deliberation, a San Francisco federal judge has ruled that software company 321 Studios’ popular DVD-copying products are illegal.
In a ruling released Friday, Judge Susan Illston granted Hollywood studios’ request for an injunction against 321 Studios, saying the small software company has seven days to stop distributing its DVD-copying products.
The case was widely viewed as a test of how far commercial software could go in helping consumers make backup copies of their own legally purchased digital entertainment products, such as DVDs or video games. Illston wrote that federal law made it illegal to sell products that--like 321 Studios’ software--break through DVDs’ antipiracy technology, even if consumers do have a legal right to make personal copies of their movies.
“It is the technology itself at issue, not the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put,” Illston wrote. “Legal downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense to the software manufacturer’s violation of the provisions (of copyright law.)”
The ruling, which had been pending since arguments last May in Illston’s court, goes a long way toward shoring up Hollywood’s weakening digital copy protections for its profitable DVD business--even while potentially eliminating one key driver of sales in the DVD burner market.
In previous interviews, 321 Studios has said it has sold about 1 million copies of its DVD-copying software, many of them through mainstream computer stores such as CompUSA. Under the ruling’s terms, the company will have to remove from its software the ability to “rip” copies of copy-protected DVDs or take the products off the market altogether.
The company said it would immediately ask for an emergency stay that would let it keep the software on the shelves but would appeal Illston’s ruling, regardless of what happened.
“We can’t just lay down for this,” 321 Studios President Robert Moore said. “It is too important for the consumer; it is far too important to the evolution of our culture...We think the final battle will be fought at the Supreme Court or at the congressional level.”
Hollywood executives praised the ruling.
“Companies have a responsibility to develop products that operate within the letter of the law and that do not expose their customers to illegal activities,” MPAA Chief Executive Officer Jack Valenti said in a statement. “Today’s ruling sends a clear message that it is essential for corporations to protect copyrighted works while facilitating the enjoyment of entertainment offerings through new digital technologies.”
Long battle over DVDs Illston’s ruling is the latest in a long string of rulings that have largely gone against critics of Hollywood’s protection efforts, even as the technology to copy DVDs has spread more widely online and off.
Most Hollywood DVDs are protected with a technology called Content Scrambling System, or CSS, which encrypts the content on the discs so that they can only be read by devices with authorized “keys” to unlock the data. A studio-affiliated trade group licenses those keys to DVD player manufacturers.
However, in 1999, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Johansen released a software program called DeCSS, which allowed computers to decrypt DVDs, even without a licensed “key.” Once the video was decrypted, it could easily be copied, and so DeCSS quickly found its way into DVD-copying tools.
Hollywood studios sued to keep DeCSS offline, and a New York federal judge ultimately agreed that posting the software online violated parts of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars distribution of tools that break through digital copy protection mechanisms.
Not long afterward, 321 Studios began selling its own software, however. Despite the New York ruling, the company argued that its software was legal and necessary in helping consumers make the personal copies federal law allows.
The company actually initiated the legal battle in early 2002, suing studios in hopes of winning a ruling that’d say its software was legal. The studios later countersued.
In her ruling Friday, Illston was unconvinced by any of 321’s arguments.
Hollywood critics have long said CSS simply controls access to DVDs and that it’s not a direct copy protection mechanism. And 321 has argued that since consumers who buy a DVD have the right to access their own movie, it would not be illegal to help them access it by using 321’s software.
Illston disagreed, saying CSS was plainly a way to protect copyright holders’ rights, as envisioned in copyright law.
She said blocking people from making perfect digital copies of their DVDs did not unconstitutionally hamper free speech or fair-use rights. People were free to make copies of movies in other, nondigital ways that would give them access to the same content, even if not in the same, pristine form, she said.
And, she said, the fact that DVD decryption keys were widely available online in programs like DeCSS did not make Hollywood’s attempts to block copying useless.
“This is equivalent to a claim that, since it is easy to find skeleton keys on the black market, a dead bolt is not an effective lock to a door,” she wrote.
Earlier this month, 321 Studios released new software that makes backup copies of computer games. That product will not be affected by this ruling, the company said.
<EOF> NYT220.doc
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Thomas Procyk
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1842
From: Royal Palm Beach, FL, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 02-22-2004 12:18 AM
This reminds me of "back in the day" where software companies would make you insert "Your original Disk 1 into Drive A" every time you wanted to play the game, even if it was on your hard drive. Once your original Disk 1 gets messed up or misplaced, you're screwed out of your own software.
Even if you used the COPY or DISKCOPY commands, it would still recognize that it wasn't an original.
There was a way around it, though. If you booted DOS from a floppy with just a bare C:\>, you could make an exact copy of the original disk -- hidden files and all -- using a simple DOS command... ironically in this case, XCOPY. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
I've used DVDXCOPY a couple times before, but just the trial version. It's not the greatest program, especially the insane amount of compression it uses even if you select "movie only" mode. (DVD-Rs are only 4.7GB, whereas most store-bought DVDs run between 5-8GB because of dual-layering, so compression is necessary to fit it on a DVD-R disc) Or the lack thereof, causing you to split a movie among two discs. This was a while ago, so I wonder if they've improved it.
There's much better stuff out there -- for free -- probably written by high-school computer geeks in small little algorithms less than 200K that will "rip" any DVD to your hard drive, strip the macrovision and region encoding, let you pick the languages and even keeps the menus. You just have to be persistent, and you can find almost anything out there...
=TMP=
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 02-22-2004 04:23 AM
Given how the Internet crosses international boundaries so easily and the fact that many other countries have not outlawed this software, I fail to see how this law will stop anyone who seriously wants to rip or copy their DVDs. OK, it would stop the casual consumer who might otherwise have impulse-bought one of these packages off the shelf from Blockbusters, but that's all.
A fortnight or so ago I wanted to use a clip from a commercial DVD in a presentation to a group of students. This took place in a university, which is licensed under a scheme which allows it to show off-air or retail video content, quite legally. I did not want to faff about changing programs and windows and stuff to play the DVD clip in the middle of the presentation - that would have looked a bit unprofessional.
It took me all of 15 minutes with Google to find all the software I needed through a Google search which enabled me to decrypt the stream from two chapters, convert it into a .AVI file, drop that into Premiere, edit it how I wanted it (e.g. a fade up and down at each end of the clip and a brief subtitle on the screen telling people what it was), render the result of MPEG-2 and drop that in to Powerpoint. I needed two programs to do this, one of which came from a website in Germany, the other in the Czech Republic.
Unless every single ISP in the United States is planning to search for and systematically block all of these sites, I see no way that the authorities can effectively enforce this rule, not least because there are some perfectly legitimate reasons why someone might want to rip content from DVDs (e.g. as above). And if I were an ISP, I'd take the line that I have better things to spend my money on than hours of staff time finding and blocking such sites. For kiddie porn maybe, but this is nowhere near the same league.
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