Media Server Manufacturer Wins in Court

whoever57 writes "The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) has lost its bid to shut down Kaleidescope, which manufactures media servers that can copy DVDs (along with decryption keys) to built in hard drives. The DVD CCA claimed that this violated the terms of the contracts that control DVD-related equipment because the DVD need not be physically present for payback. However, the judge ruled against the DVD CCA on the narrow grounds that part of the specification of the Content Scrambling System was not part of the overall license agreement. This may open up the market for similar devices."

Re:It's fairly simple...

[QuantumG]

If you're going to compare your right to copy physical items to your right to copy works, why not go the whole hog?

If you like my chair and ask me if you can make a copy, should I refuse?

Should it be illegal for me to allow you to make the copy?

Does the existance of an autocarpenter make a difference?

We have a right to copy. The law of copyright is ment to be a deal.. we give up our right to copy and the creators get a short incentive to make productive works. I don't like this deal anymore.. I want out. Who's with me?

Re:It's fairly simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in support of these arguments, I suppose if you could reproduce the movie by means of recasting and stuff you might have an argument, or you might not, since you didn't get permission to reproduce the script. It's too touchy of a subject, but I'm agreeable to copy protection toning down.

Sure, when I was 15-16, I pirated tons of songs on napster. Then napster died, and I didn't pirate as much anymore. One day, I got sick of all the miscellaneous songs on my drive, and simply deleted them all. Over the course of the last few years, I've bought over 100 cds. I could have pirated the whole albums easily, but I enjoy lossless quality, the art, booklet, etc. I buy the CD when I know the artist deserves my money. most of the CD's I bought I already had on my computer, but I looked at it as "try before you buy" type deal. I knew what I liked, and went out and bought it.

Even more recently, when I got the iPod, I ripped all the CDs to itunes and put them on there. now, I won't rip to WMP, because it puts in non-removable 2 second gaps (which microsoft refused to respond to when I inquired), nor will I use any format with restrictions on how I burn a mix, or modifies my files in any way. They're my files, and I want them how I want them. I still buy CD's though, as I don't want any DRM from itunes. however, perhaps it's time I download hymn, to that end.

My point being: I, a consumer, will not buy anything, or use any product, that will restrict the use of my music after I purchased it. I'm not giving it out for free. I use it on my ipod, computer, and if I need to, CD form, and I like to be able to reburn it without gaps or limit should my cd become scratched. I didn't buy a circular piece of plastic with a mirror on the bottom. I bought music.

The tide is turning

[pwizard2]

It seems that the pendulum is reversing direction; now it is swinging back against the media companies. (the RIAA is having to work harder in court, and now this) Hopefully this will be a long-term trend and not just a series of flukes.

Re:Payback's a bitch

[TheRaven64]

The component cost is not high. A 750GB hard disk costs about £150 retail, but 500GB disks can be as little as £70. Pop three of them in the machine, and you've got 1TB of RAID-5 storage (marketed as 'ultra reliable') for £210. DVD drives cost almost nothing now, and MPEG-2 decoder chips are under £1. You could probably build the entire device for about £300, if you paid retail for everything. In bulk, you could easily make the RRP £300. Since the average DVD is somewhere between 4GB and 9GB (a few are smaller, but most are in this ballpark), it would store 100-200 DVDs, which is significantly more than I own. If you didn't care about redundancy (after all, the DVDs themselves are a Backup), you could cut the price by just doing JBOD over two disks.

The $30,000 unit, as I recall, also includes in the price having a person insert all of your DVDs into the machine and rip them for you. It caters for the very top end of the market. The commodity marked hasn't seen this kind of device, because no one wanted to challenge the DVD CA. Now someone has done, I wouldn't be surprised if they start popping up. Tesco were selling a DVD player for £9 last time I looked, so there can't be much margin left on pure players. If you build a product that you can charge a slight premium for, then this is generally a good thing for a manufacturer.

This should have been obvious.

[mmell]

Kaleidascope's device doesn't actively decrypt the content (or specifically enable decryption for other hardware/software) - it merely makes a faithful copy of the original content, as licensed to the end-user at time of purchase. Sounds like 'fair use' to me!

Without some external form of CSS decryption software (such as libdvdcss in the Linux world), the data are no more accessible from a hard disk than they were from the original DVD. If the capacity for decrypting CSS-scrambled exists, than the medium from which the content originates is inconsequential - viewing, copying, etc. will all work identically regardless of the source medium.

Fortunately, a judge or jury somewhere got the point.