RealDVD future looking real shaky
By John Lister
The movie industry has won the first battle in its showdown with the producers of a ‘legal’ DVD copying program. A South California district judge has given RealNetworks a temporary injunction against distributing the software.
Visitors to the website for RealDVD now encounter a message reading:
Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable. Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use.
(Smartly the company is collecting e-mail addresses at the site so it can contact would-be buyers if and when it’s allowed to sell the product again.)
As things stand, RealDVD will have to be off the market until a final legal decision on the lawsuit launched by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents the leading movie studios. However, there’s a special hearing scheduled this week to hear Real Networks’ argument that it should be allowed to resume sales until as and when the software is officially judged illegal.
The MPAA lawsuit argues that the software breaches the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to bypass copyright technology – in this case, the CSS encryption system. Real claims that RealDVD doesn’t breach this law because it copies the entire disc, including the CSS encryption; the MPAA claims making it possible to copy the disc at all is inherently getting around CSS.
A second point of dispute involves a recent addition to the licensing terms for the DVD system which now requires that a disc must physically be in a machine when its contents are played. Clearly RealDVD would breach this, but it’s not yet legally certain whether the licensing change can be applied retrospectively, or even if it can be imposed without consent.
The legal uncertainty is made worse because Real Networks launched its own legal action asking for a declaratory judgment; in other words a court ruling to say the software is legal. Getting such a ruling first would, at the least, greatly undermine the MPAA’s case.
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