MPAA vs. RealNetworks: Five reasons why Hollywood will win
RealNetworks, the company behind the Real media player and Rhapsody music service, could this week become the latest courtroom conquest of the entertainment industry's fierce efforts to protect copyrights.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel is expected to hear closing arguments in proceedings that will determine whether to remove a ban on the sale of RealDVD. The $30 software enables users to create and store copies of DVDs to their computer hard drives.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the trade group representing the six largest film studios, filed suit last September to stop the sale of RealDVD and accused Real of copyright infringement and breach of contract. RealDVD and Facet, a proposed DVD player that can copy and store films, would hand users the ability to copy rented discs without paying a cent for them. The practice is known as "rent, rip, and return."
Real attorneys argued in court that the company operated within the law and that consumers have the legal right to backup copies of their media. Hollywood disagrees. "Fair use" proponents have kept a close eye on the case because a favorable decision for Real might bolster consumer rights.
But they're likely to be disappointed. Four days of testimony in a San Francisco federal court showed Real's case is trudging on very shaky legal ground. In addition to offering little evidence that it did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Real's arguments that it obtained a license to use the studio's encryption technology and therefore owned the right to copy DVDs appeared to be overwhelmed by the MPAA's evidence to the contrary.
What might be most important about this case, a courtroom victory for the MPAA could put the kibosh on Facet, the device Real hopes is representative of the next-generation DVD player. Facet, which relies on the RealDVD software to make copies, can store up to 70 movies and would retail for about $300. In court, Real CEO Rob Glaser demonstrated the device and it hops between movies and television shows as easy as an iPod flips between songs.
Facet provides the kind of functionality that consumers want and could help rejuvenate slumping DVD sales, some observers say. The device, however, may never be sold in your local Best Buy for five reasons:
The rear view of Facet, a DVD-copying disc player that Hollywood says would cost it millions in pirated movies.
(Credit: Greg Sandoval/CNET Networks)Not licensed to copy DVDs: In court, Real argued that the MPAA's breach of contract claims are baseless because the DVD Copy Protection Association, a group that includes film studios and DVD makers created to protect discs from piracy, issued it a license to use the organization's DVD Content Scramble System (CSS). This is the studio's encryption technology designed to prevent piracy.
When RealDVD copies movies, it never cracks the encryption, according to experts called to testify by Real. The MPAA's witnesses argued that the CSS license gives Real permission only to playback DVDs, not to copy them. Marsha King, a retired vice president at Warner Bros., testified that the whole purpose of the DVD-CCA licensing was to prevent consumer copying. "The studios were adamant that no copy be placed on the (computer) hard drive," she told the court.
Cracking ARccOS and RipGuard violates DMCA: Perhaps the weakest area of Real's defense is the circumvention of ARccOS (Advanced Regional Copy Control Operating Solution) and RipGuard.
The MPAA says these are anticopying technologies used by some of the major film studios as another layer of piracy protection in addition to CSS. They're not included in the CSS license. This means that even if the CSS license gave Real permission to copy, it wouldn't protect Real's cracking of ARccOS and RipGuard. Circumvention of copy protections violates the DMCA.
Real denied ARccOS or RipGuard are copy-protection measures. Douglas Dixon, one of Real's technology experts, testified both technologies are ineffective. This was one of the reasons the studios rarely used them, he said.
To illustrate his point, Dixon said Sony Pictures used ARccOS or RipGuard on just four film titles last year. Real's argument was this: if a copy protection isn't effective then it isn't really protecting anything and is not covered by the DMCA.
The irony is that Arccos and RipGuard were effective enough to foil Real's months-long attempt to crack them--starting in 2007--court documents showed. The copy protections even stumped Rocket Division, a company hired by Real to decrypt ArccOS and RipGuard, and a group the MPAA calls a "Ukranian hackers."
"Been...fighting with it for two weeks and no big success yet," wrote one of Rocket Division's managers in an e-mail to a Real executive. "With Arccoss the task appeared to be a little bit -- a little harder than we thought."
The studios told Patel that Real's argument that a copy protection needs to be impossible to break for it to be covered by the DMCA isn't logical. Why would unbreakable encryption need a law banning circumvention? The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions are designed to cover all copy protections, MPAA lawyers said.
Studios could lose millions: Claims by the MPAA that RealDVD could cause significant financial harm were less convincing when the case was just about the software. With scores of similar products that cost nothing and were readily available online, why would anyone pay $30 for technology that were restricted by copy controls? RealDVD allows a user to watch a copied movie on five individual devices while copies made from software such as HandBrake are free of such limitations.
Then, Real's efforts to develop Facet surfaced and that changed the picture.
RealDVD was only one part of Real's DVD-copying strategy. The prize for Real was selling a box that copied and stored movies. Glaser acknowledged during the hearing that Facet offers no protection against piracy other than presenting a notice urging users not to copy movies they don't own.
Judge appears skeptical: Judge Patel has indicated several times that she isn't buying Real's story.
After Glaser outlined his company's attempts to stop Facet users from pirating films with little more than strong language, Patel hurumphed "Do you think this will be more effective than 'Just Say No?" This was a reference to the anti-drug campaign launched by the Reagan administration that was derided by critics for being naive and ineffective.
Last fall, when Patel halted sales of RealDVD, she told lawyers from both sides that she had questions about whether the software could enable mass copyright infringement. During opening arguments in the injunction hearing, one of Real's lawyers suggested that the company was in the right because it helped consumers backup their films.
"It's even more attractive to consumers to get everything for free," Patel said, in a seemingly sarcastic remark.
Real is grasping at legal straws: By accusing the studios of antitrust violations late in the process, Real is signaling that the company is less than confidant in it's case. In what appears to be a "Hail Mary" legal maneuver, Real claimed last week in a court filing that the studios are a cartel and that the CSS licensing agreement is proof they are guilty of boycotting Real.
This is a little late for Real to be raising these issues. The company could have made the claims at any time since September. Neither the CSS license, nor the studios relationship to it, is new.
Regardless of where Real's claims go, antitrust cases take years to litigate and will be unlikely to help RealDVD or Facet reach the market any time soon.
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
Umm... I *REALLY* think you have something backwards in your thinking. The MPAA exists to protect the studios - not the consumers and not even the artists that make the content. I'm really not sure how you could make such a fundamental error.
So how, pray tell, are they here to protect the consumer's rights? That is almost like saying that the UAW union exists to protect drivers. No, obviously, they are there to protect the rights of the auto workers. Same with the MPAA, they exist to protect the intellectual property (copy right/trade mark) of the ones who produce movies, TV shows, etc. They could care less about the rights of the common consumer of the products that their members put out.
Lastly, I do disagree but I am not a troll. And I like Linux but can't say that I love it. It's a computing tool, just like Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.
Cheers
If the MPAA was set up to protect me, then how is it accomplishing that mission? Give me examples, please. It seems to me, and I'd love to hear your take on this, that the MPAA is very similar to the artist guilds from centuries past. They seem more interested in protecting the source of their members' incomes than my right, as a consumer, to apply fair-use.
I don't view digital content in the same way that the studios do. If I am legally allowed to rip CDs I should be legally allowed to rip DVDs. If I'm caught distributing mp3s then I should be prosecuted for distributing stolen goods (the real world equivalent). Same with videos ripped from a DVD. I should be able to put a video on my computer, watch it on my DVD player, and have a back-up copy for when I go on vacation. I shouldn't have to buy several copies of one DVD at full price just because I have multiple devices.
Having said all of that, I do appreciate that several BlueRay movies have come with both a DVD and a digital copy of the movie. I think that people would be willing to purchase digital copies of DVDs for a reasonable price (say, $2). All they would have to do is register their DVD online, pay for the copy, and then download it. It isn't rocket science here. Then, if you lost your digital copy (computer crashed, multimedia player stolen, etc), you could send an email explanation and then receive an email link for you to either pay for another copy or receive another download link. Both the MPAA/RIAA and the consumers would win with a system like that. It would provide another revenue stream for the studios.
At any rate, please explain why you find my opinion to be wrong.
Cheers
There is no consumer in the title and therefore they are not consumer focused. The MPAA is only concerned with protecting its members profit margin. Anyone that says otherwise is mistaken or a fool.
Everyone else knows who the true troll is...
Why bother, when you can have several other software packages that will do the same thing for free and produces a copy that is restriction free, unlike RealDVD.
"How would Real Networks like it if they only sold one copy of the product, and everyone else in the world got to use it for free?"
Except that is not what Real is enabling. Their software encrypts the copy and restricts it to 5 computers.
@Vegadan_Man I hope that was sarcasm.
Then there's the Beta ruling, that allows an owner of a copy of media provided to make as many copies as they want for fair use. I know many people who abused this system by renting a movie on VHS, then copying it, via a box sold cheaply only in airline magazines to stabilize the picture, and record it to Beta. But today, it's different, we're lied to. No, it's simple: the MPAA wants us to buy the movie again in a downloadable format to give more profits to the movie companies for content they already made money on.
Lastly, so what if Real loses? AnyDVD, DVD X Copy Platinum (which is still out there in cracked form all over the Internet), Mac the Ripper, Handbrake's old versions, VLC, MPEGstreamclip, etc. all allow a way to copy DVD data. Wouldn't all of those have to be stopped? But how? Like in DVD X Copy's case, the company doesn't exist anymore, and in AnyDVD's case, they reside nowhere, constantly movie from location to location. (All information presented has be discussed on various Leo Laporte podcast shows over the last four years.)
The cost of entry is also several orders higher (i.e. thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a "starter" system). If you can afford a Kaleidescape, you're probably not a consumer that would "rent, rip, return" anyway.
Tell you want RIAA and MPAA! You invest in R&D for a DVD disk that will not break,bend or scratch then I will be a happy consumer with your products. Until then we demand that we be able to backup our legal retail purchases.
I do not want to see myself going to the store time after time for buying the exact same movie title time and time again. .
I think the Real's response to ARCCOS misses the point, though. ARCCOS by definition is a mechanism for reagion code enforcement, which is not a copy protection feature. It's not even an access control feature per se, since it's perfectly valid to have an out-of-region player. ARCCOS is a market-segmentation imposition technology -- purely a technological implementation of a marketing / pricing plan.
RipGuard is not a general copy protection technology since it really only attempts to thwart a specific copying procedure (which they aren't using), and, even then, it doesn't properly permit legal copying (e.g., to pull clips for editorial purposes, etc.), so it's probably not a valid copy control anyway. Preventing legal uses of the content would violate the terms of the copyright (which, by law, permit lawful fair use of the content). Copyright's a ***-for-tat thing, you can't claim protection without acceding certain rights to the public...
Why can't the MPAA come up with a license code system much like M$ has for it's products and that your DVD can be played on unlimited devices, but can only be copied to one device? This is the reason iTunes and Amazon will succeed in their online stores for high volume media consumers. I'm allowed to copy my movies from iTunes onto 5 different computers for playback, as well as back them up on an infinite amount of sources in the event my hard drive or storage device breaks.
Now, if there's a fire I'd be screwed if it wasn't for my backup to my server at my office. However, I'd lose every single one of my DVDs and Video Games.. but all my iTunes purchases, my ripped DVDs, my MP3s and other music... would be saved.
Broadband data caps are alive and well. My ISP quietly implemented them. The "Penalty" is slower speeds. Not a shut down so it's less noticable but still there just the same and can get in the way of watching a movie. My main competitor to cable also has data caps.
There's a whole set of tools out there and readily available for ripping DVDs.
Wasn't BETA and VHS supposed to kill the movie industry due to rampant piracy?
The MPAA isn't concerned about what's right or wrong; just that they guarrantee a fortune to their backers.
The movie studios, like any organisation, in trying to protect their current business/revenue model only end up hurting the consumer and stifling innovation.
What these dinosaurs need to do, but they won't because it makes too much sense, is to make it easier for people to use the content they paid for. Rewarding works a lot better than punishment. Continue to pursue the pirates, but stop having a heart attack on things like RealDVD. Stop treating everyone as guilty until proven innocent (that is the media's job). Embrace advancements and stop fighting them. Think about the customer. But these will never happen because it is different.
In other words she said that because users had other ways of violating the copy protection provisions of the DCMA, there was no need for a piece of software to do it to enable a user's fair use rights.
The fact is the DCMA is a contradictory piece of legislation. It pretends to protect consumer rights with fair use, when in fact exercising those fair use rights violates other portions of the DCMA. There is no way for a library, student, university, researcher or any other person with fair use rights to copy a portion of any format of a movie without circumventing copy protection. You can't do it with VHS tapes (hardware copy protection) you can't do it with DVD players (hardware copy protection) and you can't do it with computer software.
The cost of piracy is already built into the pricing model for movies, the same as it is for CDs and will be soon for books. Just as people who buy car insurance pay a premium because of those that don't, so do people who buy movies. If a DVD came with a facility for creating a very limited number of fair use backups, the MPAA would have a valid argument and the DCMA would remain a legal piece of legislation. As it stands now, neither is true.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Call it by its name "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" or by its Acronym DMCA and it's still really the RIAA/MPAA Act.
Sad how losers like yourself think that attacking members of the public who simply want fair consumer rights is a sound marketing strategy. Any sympathy I might have had for the movie industry has gone right out the window because of idiots like yourself.
As the guy above me said, I hope the checks in the mail because you certainly seem to be their willing *****.
If you want to try and appear to have an education, and if you want people to listen to you (as the two trolls have to me) you need to have a basic communication skills.
Yes, this is the internet and typos and other mistakes happen all the time, but most people can read past them or understand them so that it does not detract from the flow of the reading process. I did the same here until I realized 'DCMA' was used in the entire posting. This made me not want to read the entire post because the perceived intelligence of the poster dropped. This could have been the best comment posted and that one glaring error just makes it lose all worth because it shows that the poster does not have a clear understanding of the subject matter.
The point is that if you want people to take you seriously you have to come across as having a basic 12th grade education.
P.S. Feel free to pick apart my text above, I'm sure you will find something wrong to point out. =)
Have a great day!
Same happens here. Hollywood and the RIAA have for many years stolen movies and songs from their original creators, independent studios, and resell them for a premium. Why? Cause they have the distribution channels. Movie theaters, DVD releases, market control. They are the "media cartels".
Who has won? Lawyers (big studio and artists') and middlemen. With the Internet, digital medium distribution and the downturn, this has changed radically.
What will happen in the end?. Probably tons of "pirric victories" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory) Win the battle, loose the war. Just remember how Napster and MP3.com gave birth to $1 dollar iTunes.
My two cents (not given to the Hollywood biggies, of course)
Most DVD's and CD's come on very poor Silicone disk. It easier to scratch a media disk than a store bought back up disk . All money that is lost don't count for the MPAA members record profits on their balance sheets reported on the New york Stock exchange. It very important for all of us to make donation to customer rights groups to fight this. It very important to vote out Politicians that don't protect the Customer rights . And vote out Judges that vote against customer rights.
MPAA is trying to make a media formats that they have 100 's control over and break up patents
that move us forward to a more advanced technology world. America is customer based country economy Now media companies want to limit that customer base and technology advancements. Control the Horizontal , vertical, color and content we view in our home. Sound like the Outer limits
- by Renegade Knight May 18, 2009 11:35 AM PDT
- " it wouldn't protect Real's cracking of ARccOS and RipGuard. Circumvention of copy protections violates the DMCA."
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- by unknown unknown May 18, 2009 1:16 PM PDT
- The MPAA and probably the studio's they represent are under the delusion that such copy protection is flawless therefore any successfully copying must be the result of willful circumvention. Chunks of 2418 bytes of junk interspersed at random locations on the disc is hardly a robust system, at least in my opinion.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (59 Comments)Why do you need to crack a CD to copy it if you copy it with the copy protection intact? This is possible since DVD makers spit out DVD's by the thousands complete with intact copy protection.