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Kaleidescape CEO Speaks Out About CSS Lawsuit 212

Posted by timothy from the fighting-the-forces-of-nonsense dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has an interview with Michael Malcolm, the CEO of Kaleidescape, which you might remember as the high-end DVD jukebox manufacturer that was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association for violating its CSS license. Despite the fact that anyone who can afford a $27,000+ DVD jukebox also usually ends up buying hundreds of movies to load onto it, the DVD-CCA wants them to redesign the Kaleidescape to require the presence of the physical DVD disc in the drive during authentication and playback. Besides defeating the whole purpose of having a jukebox in the first place (none of their jukeboxes allow for copying, streaming, or sharing DVDs), Malcolm says he can't find any clause in their CSS license which would require them to implement this "feature" anyway and they're about to file a counter-action against the DVD-CCA."
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Kaleidescape CEO Speaks Out About CSS Lawsuit More

Kaleidescape CEO Speaks Out About CSS Lawsuit

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  • They're afraid of what - DVD swapping? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:35PM (#11672618) Homepage
    I think DVD-CCA is indeed afraid of two billionaires swapping 78 pounds Kaleidescapes on their 50-foot yachts in the open sea.

    With the proposed protection feature, they'll have to bring out their DVDs for the exchange too.

  • What they are afraid of (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:38PM (#11672655) Journal
    "I just loaded my DVD into my Jukebox... I don't need the DVD anymore, so I guess I'll go sell it on ebay or give it away..."

    That's what they're afraid of, and they're probably right.

    • Re:What they are afraid of (Score:4, Insightful)

      by halivar ( 535827 ) <bfelger@nOSPAM.gmail.com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:40PM (#11672675)
      That's what they're afraid of, and they're probably right.

      I don't think they're right to be afraid of the all of two people who actually by this thing.

    • Re:What they are afraid of (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OS24Ever ( 245667 ) * <trekkie@nomorestars.com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:43PM (#11672712) Homepage Journal
      If someone can afford a $27,000 system (starting price) I really doubt they're going to be worried about recouping their $19.95 investment on a DVD or screwing with eBay to do it...
      • ... to be worried about recouping their $19.95 investment on a DVD or screwing with eBay to do it

        There are employees to get worried (screwed, maybe).

        CC.
      • *cough*NetFlix*cough*

      • If someone can afford a $27,000 system (starting price) I really doubt they're going to be worried about recouping their $19.95 investment on a DVD or screwing with eBay to do it..

        Hmm...
        3.3TB storage, assume 4GB/movie, assume $20/movie purchase. Assume $10 profit from eBay sale. (Numbers pulled from the ether.)

        It'll hold 825 movies. That's $16500 to buy the movies, and $8250 from selling them... which won't cover the cost of the jukebox. So yeah, someone who buys one of these probably wouldn't bother.

        • Well, let's see:

          Total cost is $27,000 + $16,500 = $43,500 and $8,250 back yields about a 20% discount on the system.

          So that's good. And just think how much fun said billionaire will have selling 825 DVDs to the proletariat on eBay.

          • Re:What they are afraid of (Score:3, Interesting)

            by TGK ( 262438 )
            I can't think of 825 movies I'd bother loading on to the thing.

            Hell, I'll take it one step further. If I could flat out HAVE any movie I wanted I don't think I'd have 825 movies on the list.

            99% of what's out there is poorly thought out, poorly implemented, poorly written tripe.

            The 1% that's left over, that's what I'd buy and load up on my hypothetical jukebox. Even then, I doubt I could sell Casablanca on Ebay for much of anything.

      • But they might as well block it now for the cheapo juke boxes later.

      • Re:What they are afraid of (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TiggertheMad ( 556308 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:55PM (#11673786) Journal
        If someone can afford a $27,000 system (starting price) I really doubt they're going to be worried about recouping their $19.95 investment on a DVD or screwing with eBay to do it...

        Hell, I can't afford a 27k system to watch movies on and I wouldn't bother selling stuff I copied on E-Bay. I buy movies for between $10-20. I might get half of that back. My time is worth more than that.

        The only time I have any real urge to pirate movies, is when I have to deal with fisking region encoding BS, CSS, and Macrovision. These things irritate me to the point that I want to make sure that whatever company has troubled me by using these 'features', doesn't make a DIME off of me.

        I'll gladly pay for a physical copy of a movie I enjoy. Just don't tell me I can't watch a copy of a movie from china that Miramax hasn't yet ruined through editing, use my PC to watch it, or force me to sit through some sutpid 'coming to dvd soon' ad, and you will get no trouble out of me...
      • This is a huge mistake of an assumption, I think. I base this on having worked for and known several very rich people. In truth, most rich people (with the exception of rappers and such) are cheap, that's part of how they got rich. At one time in the distant past, I was Loyal Nordstrom's personal chef (in a previous life, I was a chef for a few rich people and at a restaurant in the Seattle Sheraton as well as the Esplanade in Portland). One year she gave all us little people designer toilet paper for Chris

    • Re:What they are afraid of (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:50PM (#11672773) Journal
      DVD's I haven't watched in over 6 months get donated straight to my local public library. Then LOTS of people can watch them for free.

      I've donated over 100 movies in the last year. I'll bet the DVD consortium will just love that.

      How much are you going to get on a used DVD on E-Bay? Considering damn near every new DVD is $15 at WalMart (Lord of the Rings and multi-disc sets being the exception), what difference does it make?

      Hell, I've filled in a lot of my "must have" collection from Walmart spending $10 a disc, including tax. They're now an impulse buy.

      The Kaleidescope product isn't exactly a threat to that.

      -Charles

    • Re:What they are afraid of (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:51PM (#11672791)

      I just loaded my DVD into my Jukebox... I don't need the DVD anymore, so I guess I'll go sell it on ebay or give it away..." That's what they're afraid of, and they're probably right.?

      If you RTFA you would note that they covered this. In the current storage medium, this system costs $40-$60 in hard disk space, per movie. It is cheaper to buy two DVDs. This could be a concern in the future, but don't fool yourself, that is not what this lawsuit is about. This is about a loophole that was not dreamed up by the big media companies when they went with DVD as their DRM format. The idea is to sell multiple copies of every movie for multiple locations, and multiple new players. If you can just store an exact image of a DVD on a new player, why buy another copy in DVD-purple-ray-extreme-DVD3 format in a few years? And if you can back them up, there goes all the new copies to replace worn, scratched, broken, or misplaced movies.

      • How can it cost $40-60 in hard drive space per movie? You can get 250GB drives for $200 or less, and a movie takes no more than 8.4GB for dual layer. Do you mean, the total cost per movie is $40-60 when you consider how many movies will fit on the device?
        • Actually, it isn't hard drive space...

          The guy in the article quotes a price to store a DVD.

          It is the cost of the *total* system divided by the number of DVDs it can hold.
        • They use expensive proprietary hardware and their own proprietary RAID smashup that lets them survive single disk failures and use heterogenous disks. This requires extra storage for parity information. They also use expensive proprietary rippers and expensive proprietary viewers. The whole system costs $40-$60 per movie.
        • How can it cost $40-60 in hard drive space per movie? You can get 250GB drives for $200 or less, and a movie takes no more than 8.4GB for dual layer.

          Because outside of your mum's basement, storing data is a touch more complicated that throwing in another 250G drive you bought on sale down the road.

      • And if you can back them up, there goes all the new copies to replace worn, scratched, broken, or misplaced movies.

        But the Kaleidescape isn't much of a backup solution. If you lose your original disc, the file on the Kaleidescape server is only good for watching on a Kaleidescape player. There's no way to get back a new copy for the server.

        Also, a disk imported now will always have the limitations of the current format, so the motivation is still there to buy "another copy in DVD-purple-ray-extreme-DVD
    • "I just loaded my DVD into my Jukebox... I don't need the DVD anymore, so I guess I'll go sell it on ebay or give it away..."

      This describes the situation that many digital audio fans currently find themselves in: "I just ripped my CD onto my computer, why do I need the CD?" The thing is, those shiny discs make excellent backups, especially since, if they're just sitting in their cases, they're pretty well-protected against dust and scratches.

      I rarely pull actual CDs out of my cabinet anymore. But there'

    • The truth is, that someone that pays over $30,000 for a DVD system (the people that can afford the system are probably going to not settle for the bare minimum $27,000 configuration) are not interested in screwing over the MPAA. Many of these customers are probably music and movie stars anyhow. They buy it for the unique experience of the well-built UI and the convenience of the system. They don't care if a DVD costs $20 or $100.

      Of course, the lawsuit is more about the long term possibilities... that
    • For those who don't quite get the problem, the poster is quite right. Think 'NetFlix'. All the movies I want, just copied to the device and available for my viewing whenever without the original DVD.

  • 27k? 400 dvd carousel $300 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:38PM (#11672656) Homepage Journal
    And $50-$60 per dvd for storage costs? Figure on a PC, your hdd storage is $0.60/Gb. I figure that a lot closer to $5.00/dvd not $50. How does this guy figure on charging an order of magnitude more?

    I don't get the benfit of a system costing $27-100k, when you can put something together for 5x less.


  • the term "Money-grubbing SCUM" comes immediately to mind.

    • BOO FUCKING HOO (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:13PM (#11673455)
      Listen folks, it's really fucking simple here.

      YOU created this monster. Just like South Park's "Walmart" episode--who is number 1? YOU are.

      The "threat" of DVD has been known for years. The DVDCCA came up with consumer-hostile garbage from day one: CSS, Region Encoding (aka RESTRAINT OF TRADE), and Macrovision in every pot (sorry, under every TV). YOU BOUGHT INTO IT. You just HAD to have your fucking "Matrix" DVD, didn't you? Nevermind all the problems with DVD--look at DIVX! HAH what fools! Right.

      And now we have "big brother" DVD-CCA clubbing people over the head for violating their bullshit license for their bullshit "encryption" which has already been compromised 100 ways from Sunday. We STILL have region encoding despite the fact that it IS restraint of trade. And YOU allowed it. Every one of you that ran out to get a DVD player and filling your shelves with boxed-sets of whatever--you allowed this to happen.

      So do NOT bitch about the DVDCCA. You fucking gave them the power. And you know what? Now that you let them stick their foot in the door JUST A LITTLE, they're going to try and see what ELSE they can get away with...the "broadcast" flag, the bending-over of TiVo...it's going to get worse because YOU, the drooling hordes, couldn't stop for ONE moment to say "hey, this is just a candy-coated fish hook!" Nope, GOTTA have that latest anime collection! Just GOTTA get that Matrix DVD Boxed Set!

      Now go ahead--do your Slashdot duty...whine about the DVDCCA and how they "don't get it." Contradict me by saying "so? You can just get a hacked player!" (Yeah, and Apex is SUCH great quality too *snort*). Somehow tie Bittorrent into the conversation (it's just not slashdot if you're not blathering about how great bittorrent is). Mod me down to nothing. Continue preaching to the choir.

  • Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aaitqo8496 ( 231556 ) * on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:40PM (#11672684) Journal
    It's nice to see companies standing up to the class bully...

    One day everyone will realize that the bully just had a self-esteem problem. Let's hope that day comes soon.

  • DVD CCA is almost right (Score:3, Informative)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <<ten.eriwraelc> <ta> <nallohr>> on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:41PM (#11672688) Homepage Journal
    I've always thought the right thing to do is store the DVD copies encrypted on the jukebox, and unlock access at the few restricted client machines that can authenticate with the jukebox.

    Of course, this can be done at the client, by sticking a DVD in the playback client. The client, of course caches the keys extracted from that DVD, so this only has to be done once. For large numbers of DVDs on the jukebox that one wants to make accessable to a given client, just burn a CD (or DVD) with the whole set of keys that the client can cache, or explicitly push the keys to the known authenticated clients (or some desired subset thereof).

    Sheesh, this isn't rocket science.

    • Kaleidescape does store the DVD copies encrypted on the server. It makes a bit-for bit copy. The decryption is done at the player. Everything streamed across the network is encrypted.
      • Yeah, but are they transcrypting the DVDs so they can use their own encryption mechanism? Otherwise, how does the player get the DVD CSS keys without an initial access to a DVD? I suppose the jukebox could push them to all players when reading a DVD, by default. Is that what happens?

  • Waste of time (Score:2, Insightful)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 )
    Seems pretty risky to spend years in court for this. By the time this suit is finished, some other format may be on the market (HD-DVD, BluRay, whatever..) and the people who could afford this sort of thing will be purchasing newer technology.

    • Seems pretty risky to spend years in court for this. By the time this suit is finished, some other format may be on the market (HD-DVD, BluRay, whatever..) and the people who could afford this sort of thing will be purchasing newer technology.

      Umm, considering the alternative is to go out of business, I'd say it is worth the risk. They are demanding that their DVD storage and consolidations system stops storing and consolidating DVDs. Without the feature to which the DVD consortium is objecting, the sy

      • The alternatives aren't limited to litigate or bust. They could revinvent their product, perhaps striking a deal with the license holders for the next medium. The hardware wouldn't change fundamentally, aside from the optical device. Besides, they're a subsidiary of Caster Communications [castercomm.com], of Castrol fame.. they're hardly going to go out of business unless the parent company just decides to drop the idea altogether.

        At any rate, after a quick glance at their press releases [castercomm.com], it seems they're pursuing the H

    • Re:Waste of time (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rpdillon ( 715137 )
      The motivation to take someone to court is almost always at least two-fold:
      1) Settle the outstanding issue that needs be resolved.

      2) Establish a precendent.

      (2) is much more valuable than (1) in the long run. Though the actual DVD format may become passe, the issues addressed here will not, at least not as quickly.

      Honestly, I am always pleased when something like this goes to court, since it is a demonstration that people are willing to put their money towards causes that benefit the consumer.

      Sure, you c
  • " The basic unit starts at $27,000 and some go up to $100,000 for additional storage"

    This is ridiculous, and why does the storage make that much difference? Can't you just add your own cheap storage, this thing is way overpriced!
    • Rich people don't know better. They see the solution they are looking for and they pay their servants to load their movies for easy access. When you make 10~15 million a year time is worth more than money. If they could hire someone to shit for them I'm certain they would.

      • Price is irrelevant. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by McSpew ( 316871 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:38PM (#11673166)

        Rich people don't know better.

        Know better? They don't give a shit. When your house costs $10 million, and you've got $500,000 worth of custom-installed home theater gear, plasma screen TVs, multiroom audio and video, etc., an additional $27k or even $100k isn't that much to spend to ensure that you can watch any of your movies from any of your screens any time you want. It's a helluvalot more elegant and intuitive than some hack-it-together-yourself DVR or DVD caching box. Besides, you're going to be taking your family on a holiday to Barcelona or Shanghai or Aspen during the couple of weeks it takes to get that whole thing installed, configured, tested and debugged. And you probably will pay Kaleidescape the money to duplicate your entire DVD collection onto the hard drives so you don't have reload them yourself, or have your personal electrical engineer spend a week loading your DVDs onto the system.

        Besides, if I'm some rich guy who's spent that much on his house and electronics, I'm showing off my latest "I'm cooler-than-you" gadgets to my other ultra-rich friends before we head off to cruise the Mediterranean in my private yacht. The people who buy this are the same people who buy the Ford GT (~$140k), the Mercedes SL65 AMG (~$140k), the Bentley Arnage T (~$250k), the Maybach 57 ($~$330k) or the Porsche Carrera GT (~$440k). The cost is irrelevant--it's all about the cool.

        BTW: The CEO of the company I work for has recently bought both a Ford GT (~$140k) and a Mercedes SL65AMG (~$140k). That's to go along with the BMW 760Li (~$90k) he already owns, his $14 million Learjet, his $12 million house, etc.

        • It is worse than price being irrelevant.

          Your post talks about the "cooler than you" factor.

          Well, in some cases, a higher price can get a higher demand, due to the impression that something is better because it is more expensive. Better meaning "cooler", highher quality, etc.

          The demand curve isn't merely flat, it slopes in a counter-intuitive way.

          There is a whole price range at which there is little software ever sold. Too expensive for the cheap people and too cheap for the people who are used to paying
    • Can't you just add your own cheap storage, this thing is way overpriced!

      You could build your own multi-TB disk system for $5,000 and use DVDecryptor and daemon tools and do the same thing. Trust me, I've been figuring out how much it would be to do it myself.

      The thing with this hardware is that its more or less proprietary. No way to just add regular IDE drives into the RAID array. To comply with DVD-CSS it would need to be encrypted or protected somehow all the way to the playback device.
    • " The basic unit starts at $27,000 and some go up to $100,000 for additional storage"

      This is ridiculous, and why does the storage make that much difference? Can't you just add your own cheap storage, this thing is way overpriced!
      The article isn't clear on this point but each unit comes with its own lawyer..
    • The system costs a lot, in part because the market is small. They aren't expecting John Q. Walmart buyer, or a Chevy or Toyota owner to buy these, they are expecting to sell it to the wealthy, the people that wouldn't blink at the cost of a Ford GT40 or Lamborghini or the cost of the clothing in fashion magazines.

      The article doesn't state how much storage that extra $73k gets. Per drive, the storage for this system itself doesn't cost much more than an Xserve RAID.

    • Re:Forget about the lawsuit, this product is crap! (Score:4, Informative)

      by agrippa_cash ( 590103 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:37PM (#11673158) Homepage
      It isn't just storage. The one I messed around with had (I think) 3tb. It grabs and stores the cover art and some imdb-type info, and I think it suggests related selections. It is overpriced, and the size of a minifridge, but you aren't just paying for storage, I think you get a 200 disk changer and another unit that I think is for playback (as opposed to storage).

      I'm sure OSS could whip up something similar, but if you are buying this you just want it to work and you want someone to yell at then you can't get the cover art for "Hope Floats"

      I'd never thought about the legal aspects of it, because it seems to me like fair-use backup. The DVDs are stored encrypted, so there isn't anything amiss there.
  • You will find yourself taking messures that in any other situations would be ridicoulous. This happends with copyright, it's an UNNATURAL law, and so, it's unenforceable. If you try to charge people for the air they breath, or for what they think about, you will find that this are basic freedoms of the human been, and that, because of their nature, it's allmost impossible to measure / control / quote them. But there is a HUGE bussines built arround copyright low, and the big boys making tons of money out of it won't just let it go, so, expecto more and more ridicolous ideas and restrictive methods in the future. They just won't stop.

    ALMAFUERTE

  • Honky-tonk (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stanistani ( 808333 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:50PM (#11672781) Homepage Journal
    "a $27,000+ DVD jukebox"

    Betcha cain't rest your beer on it and cry about yer lost love...

    Gotta have Dolly parton onit...

  • Forgotten passwords (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the.rhorn@nOsPAm.gmail.com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:53PM (#11672797) Homepage Journal
    Their suit says that Kaleidescape must redesign its system to require the presence of the physical DVD disc in the drive during authentication and playback.

    "I forgot my password. Can you reset it?"

    "Sure, what's your password?"

  • The argument should be simple (Score:3, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:56PM (#11672829) Homepage
    "Prior to playback, the data from the original DVD is decoded into memory and stored there for a period of time. In this instance, the memory is magnetic media rather than memory chips on the system board."

    I don't see a violation especially as no method for extracting the decoded data exists to my understanding of this device. I think the DVD-CCA is being [surprisingly?] overzealous with their issues here. But who knows... something good could come of this if the DVDCCA loses as I suspect they will.

  • Mac OS X has "jukebox" feature, too (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:59PM (#11672856)
    How is this different from the feature in Mac OS X which lets you drag copy a mounted DVD to your hard disc for playback later? You just need to have the physical DVD disc in the drive the first time Apple's DVD Player plays the hard disc version to prove that you own the physical DVD. I guess it must copy the DVD CSS key to your hard disc somewhere.

  • Yet another blow to Web Standards! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:00PM (#11672869) Homepage Journal
    Dammit, first IE doesn't support CSS properly, now this! Screw it, I'm going back to tables.

  • Kaleidescape + Netflix or blockbuster subscription (Score:4, Insightful)

    by doormat ( 63648 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:06PM (#11672909) Homepage Journal
    Basically all the movies you'd ever want. As quick as you can get them from your company of choice.

  • Flamebait (Score:3, Funny)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:07PM (#11672915) Homepage
    Who gave DVD-CCA mod points?!?!

  • Latest Playback Requirement: Live Actors (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:07PM (#11672918)
    The newest ruling requires the whole cast and crew of a film to be present - living or deceased - in order to play a movie...

    Though the requirement will be an adjustment for some, once viewers get used to handling shovels and arranging for flights and hotel stays, they should get back to just enjoying their films...
  • I was in SAM's last week just browsing when something caught my eye. It was a typical looking rectangle plastic DVR but what was interesting was the removable drive bay built into it. It was only ~$250 and had all of the inputs you could ever want except HD. I think that would make a pretty decent jukebox for my home system.

  • What are they scared of??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by laughingcoyote ( 762272 ) <barghesthowl&excite,com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:43PM (#11673201) Journal

    Why sure, I'm going to buy a $27,000 machine to copy DVD's that I actually bought, because I can't afford them. That would be much smarter then using a $400 PC to get them off of Bittorrent.

    Once the **AA's decide to embrace digital distribution instead of attempting to squash it, they'll make the same killing they have off every other technology they fought at first. Remember, radio and, later, the cassette tape were going to be the end of the music business. We're tired of hearing that the sky is falling. Start adapting your business model to technology, and quit telling us to adapt technology to your business model.

  • George Lucas Guilty of Pirating his own films (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StateOfTheUnion ( 762194 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:52PM (#11673288) Homepage
    George Lucas has a Kaleidescape box . . . He mentions it in a Sound & Vison interview [soundandvisionmag.com][soundandvisionmag.com] (Its on page four of the interview about halfway down the page. Just a brief mention.)

    I guess Lucas is guilty of pirating his own films . . . The concept of extreme protection of digital content is really getting out of hand when someone like Lucas can't legally "backup" his films onto another media. I don't really understand this when no one prosecutes the average Joe from copying a CD to tape or CD to MP3 player for convenience . . . Isn't this all that the Kaleidescope box does? Copies from one media to another for ease and convenience?

    If you can do it with music, then why can't you do it with movies?

  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by flyingsquid ( 813711 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:59PM (#11673343)
    An innovative startup company is being sued by Random House and other publishers for a product which can hold the text and figures of up to 500 books. Their new product stores the words and pictures of of up to 500 novels, paperbacks, or coffee table books and allows any one of the thousands of words and pictures to be accessed in an instant. Called the "bookshelf", the new product goes on sale starting at $49.99. Publishers complain that there is nothing to prevent the owner of this data-storage system from making photocopies of the books, lending the books , or reading the books and then selling them at a discount to others. The publishers claim that if the technology is not regulated, it has the, potential to destroy the publishing industry, leaving thousands of editors starving on the streets of New York.
  • For those of you who can't be bothered to go through the website's source code looking for where the video should be:

    mplayer mms://www.kaleidescape.com/TheKaleidescapeExperien ce

    the -dumpstream option will save to file, ~11MB. Although save to file may be illegal as you aren't watching via the authorised player :/

  • Yet Another Linux/DVD Post (Score:4, Funny)

    by masterOfTheObivous ( 858583 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:05PM (#11673379)
    This article reminded me of an interesting interview with Jack Valenti I read a while back in MIT's student newspaper, The Tech. Here's a link to the interview [mit.edu] for those interested in reading it.

    This quote is the one that made me laugh out loud, and shows that we (meaning the Linux/Slashdot/techie crowd) just aren't getting through to the proper people so that changes can be made. [Note: TT is "The Tech" and JV is "Jack Valenti"]

    TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should use one of these licensed players that would be available soon. They're still not available -- it's been four years.

    JV: Well why aren't they available? I don't know, because I don't make Linux machines.
    Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, that's wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can't fuss at people, because you're one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?
    TT: About two million.
    JV: Well, I can't believe there's not any -- there must be a reason for... Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question -- I don't know the answer to that... Well, you're telling me a lot of things I don't know.
    TT: Okay. Well, how can we have this dialogue?
    JV: Well, we're having it right now. I want to try to find out the point you make on why are there no Linux licensed players. There must be a reason -- there has to be a reason. I don't know.

    During all his time presiding over the MPAA, he didn't even realize the enormity of the problem. That sends the message that word justisn't getting out. This case, should Michael Malcolm be successful and gain some ground, may finally allow Linux users to legally play DVD's they bought with their own money.

  • Wealthy people don't steal? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by msblack ( 191749 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:06PM (#11673388)
    I love all these arguments that assume someone wealthy enough to purchase a $27,000 system is not about to steal DVDs, especially since many are probably movie stars already. Have you forgotten about the SAG member in 2004 who gave away his screeners? What about Martha Stewart and her attempt to save $30,000 with her ImClone stock. Winona Ryder convicted of shoplifting. The list goes on and on.



    People at all income levels can be thieves. I doubt you could find any correlation between income level and thievery. As one poster commented, why not just add every NetFlix rental to their jukebox?

  • Wanted: Lawsuits (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:20PM (#11673522) Homepage Journal
    We need more legal precedents that show that time and space shifting recorded performances that we legally own is a legal practice. We have these rights, fair use of our copies that we own. But until its documented in legal precedent in the modern age, copyright owners will see a chance to intimidate and scam their way to suck up our rights to add margins to their bottom line at our expense.

  • The DVD-CCA are more than just nonsensical. (Score:5, Informative)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:21PM (#11673528)
    They're outright liars.

    I was one of the good number of people named in the DeCSS case. I was offering a mirror of DeCSS on my site, in the hopes that people would be inspired to build a Linux DVD player package around it (or, at a minimum, that they could have used the Windows binaries to rip DVDs and then play them under Linux).

    They sent me an email saying that because I hadn't responded to their earlier email, they were taking me to court.

    Only problem is... I grepped my entire mail spool forwards, backwards and sideways (I never delete mails to my home email box, except spam, and even then rarely; I like being able to search for anything I've received) and could not find any previous email.

    I called them, emailed them, etc., trying to ask them why they are claiming that I received a previous email when I didn't. Naturally I got nowhere.

    I ended up having to sign an agreement basically stating that I'll never license or sell CSS technology. Over a lie of theirs.

    (Not like I would license or sell their shit, but a sufficiently slimy lawyer-- and they have plenty-- would be able to argue that selling a used DVD-ROM drive (or a used DVD!) on eBay violates the agreement I made with them...)
  • I wouldn't actually mind so much playing movies from the DVD if they didn't force me to sit through trailers every time (are you listening, Disney?), not to mention an ugly 30-second animated intro to the menu, with which I can't actually choose "play" until I've sat through the whole goddamned intro.
  • This particular device certainly isn't a threat because it's too expensive. However, what about when less expensive versions come out? If a machine like this was a few hundred dollars I'm sure a lot of people would fill theirs with movies they borrow from friends or rent.

    Maybe the MPAA wants to stop this now before that becomes a reality. If they permit this sort of thing now they may be unable to stop it later.

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