Judge seals courtroom in MPAA DVD-copying case
SAN FRANCISCO--A federal judge sealed a courtroom on Friday after attorneys for the Motion Picture Association of America and another Hollywood group claimed that confidential information might be disclosed during testimony about DVD-encryption technology.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel kicked the public out of the courtroom at around 2:30 p.m. PDT, overruling objections from CNET News and RealNetworks, which also said it opposed the unusual request.
An attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association, which is involved in a lawsuit here over DVD-backup software sold by RealNetworks, said details about the technology used to encrypt DVDs justified the request to give the public the boot during witness testimony--which, according to legal precedent, should be reserved only for rare cases.
"I find that this does meet the requirements for a trade secret," Patel said. "We're going to protect what needs to be protected. I'm ordering everyone not signed off on a confidentiality agreement to leave the courtroom."
"The MPAA is trying to seal proprietary specifications," said DVD-CCA attorney Reginald Steer. He added: "This is critical to our presentation."
Steer said the trade secrets related to licensing technology and CSS, or Content Scrambling System, which is an algorithm used to encrypt DVDs. DVD-CCA once filed a lawsuit against programmer Jon Johansen, who wrote a DVD-descrambling utility that circumvented CSS--a suit that had the unintended consequence of publicizing the code widely, including on ties, T-shirts, and at least one haiku poem.
Corynne McSherry, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has been following this case and was in the courtroom, said Patel chose an unfortunate procedure when barring the public from the room on Friday.
"She implied that we should have filed a motion preemptively," McSherry said. "If that's true, the public shouldn't have to go to court to make the courtroom stay open...Presumably the plaintiffs had known for months that they were planning to close this hearing. This is not the right way to do it."
CNET News contacted the MPAA in advance and asked if the group would attempt to close the courtroom on Friday; the MPAA replied earlier this week it would not seek to do so.
The MPAA, the lobbying group for the six largest film studios, alleges that RealDVD violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because it bypasses the copy protection built into DVDs. The DMCA generally restricts companies from developing products that circumvent antipiracy protections, but Real says that its RealDVD product complies with the law.
When arguing for the courtroom to be cleared of anyone that was bound by a non-disclosure agreement, attorneys for the DVD-CCA acknowledged that some of its technology had been cracked and published on the Web. But, they said, that information represented only a small fraction of the keys, algorithms and other trade secrets which have never been appeared publicly.
Details about CSS and Johansen's DeCSS code --which was the subject of an injunction nine years ago by a court in New York--is widely distributed including through a online gallery published by a Carnegie Mellon University researcher. In addition, programs like the DVD-descrambling utility Handbrake are in common use.
Patel's initial response in the morning seemed skeptical. She joked that if DVD-CCA and the MPAA wanted to close the courtroom, "You should have gotten yourself a private judge. This is an open forum."
Under long-standing U.S. law, courtrooms are open by default. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is binding on Patel, has said that judges considering closing a courtroom or sealing records "must provide sufficient notice to the public and press to afford them the opportunity to object or offer alternatives. If objections are made, a hearing on the objections must be held as soon as possible."
Once that hearing is held, the courtroom can only be closed if specific conditions are met, including that there are no alternatives that are practical. Also, the judge must "make specific factual findings," and not just claim it was necessary.
A CNET News reporter objected to the courtroom closure. CNET News' publisher, CBS Interactive, is weighing its options in terms of a legal challenge. CNET intervened last year in federal court in a case pitting Facebook against ConnectU to unseal documents, a dispute that ended up before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Updated 12:55 p.m. PDT to add more background.
Updated 3 p.m. PDT to note the courtroom had been closed.
That is incorrect. Greg Sandoval here, one of the authors of the story and the CNET reporter who was at the court hearing. I'm very proud to say that at a time when very few publications spend money for anything beyond the barest essentials, CBS and CNET continue to invest in the First Amendment freedoms you and I enjoy. I have to admit when I emailed my bosses to alert them that Patel was considering to kick us out of the courtroom I was worried about what our response would be. Money is tight everywhere. Would they want to spend $ on this? But I received a response very quickly. I was told me to object to the closing of the courtroom by our new editor-in-chief. CNET and CBS managers also offered to send a lawyer down to argue our side. There just wasn't enough time, however. Truth be told, I don't know if our corp guys have any more conviction about the 1st amendment than then next guy. I don't have any contact with them. But I do know that when I asked them for help they came through. I for one am grateful.
Thanks for reading. GS
They still don't get it... You don't need the key in order to physically copy a DVD... Whatever is encrypted on disc A will transfer to disc B with no problem.... (Encypted code and all.) CD/DVD players are on the market that will record the so called "hidden" track 0 too.... So their whole court 'side-show' was just a complete waste of time.... HD Television is already in their favour too... They lobbied hard for all HD TV tuners to contain the "Broadcast flag" technology which encodes in the broadcast what a tuner is allowed to record and even for how long a customer can keep it.... I remember when TiVO implmented the Macrovision technology they ended up wiping out a bunch of people Simpsons cartoon episodes by accident....
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Tivo, Comcast, or HBO just screwed me by deleting a recording with no recovery
April 15, 2008 8:08 PM PDT
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-9919829-62.html
To that I say everyone make sure you keep a working VCR for the future when digital only devices are completely manipulated by the RIAA/MPAA and national broadcasters. They will have all the say on what knowledge or information is syndicated or even available for archive in the public's posessions.
Well, we are close to having a Fascist government, where private corporations run the government, control the courts, and write the laws.
Don't be a pansy idiot that just sits there and makes a false statement about the "evil" corporation that has made your life so easy to live that you can go to a grocery store and buy anything you want, anytime.
We recorded songs off the radio with great success years ago.
Point blank people can already pirate perfectly well and consumers will be happier knowing that they can copy their digital media for personal uses. I myself want backups of everything digital and find it asinine that they don't let us back the DVDs or give us multiple copies when we buy them.
MPAA made technology that utterly failed and now are trying to prevent copying 9 years after it was initially done. I think they already dropped the ball. Real however should not be able to profit from people copying DVDs as everyone who has knows how can get software for free to do the same thing. I think Real should get fined huge.
The movie corporations are just trying to keep their control for charging extra on DVD'S they release that quote "have a digital copy".
1. Charge a REASONABLE price for their products. $20 dollars for a CD is NOT a reasonable price anymore considering that it costs less than 5 cents to press a CD and 5 cents to transport a CD to a store.
2. Realize that DRM is NEVER going to be acceptable to ANY user, not even the regular users. It just gets in the way of people protecting their investments by backing up their discs. Until these companies offer replacement discs at no charge for a LIFETIME.... get rid of the DRM!
3. Realize that it is NOT acceptable to charge people 4 different times for the same thing for 4 devices. It is ONE charge for ALL devices, period and done with.
Your #1 is just crazy. I find it nuts that in an "information age" some people persist in thinking that the cost of a physical manufacturing cost has even the slightest thing to do with the cost of the final item. It's like saying if I offer you tomorrow's newspaper, it should only cost 50 cents or whatever, the price of the pulp.
#2 - companies offer replacement disks at no charge for life? What are they, an insurance company? You can't get a guarantee on anything for more than a year or 3. If you want this service, you're going to have to pay for it. An open-ended liability will never be acceptable to a seller (welcome to accounting 101), especially when each time it is lost, it's your fault, not theirs!
#3 - Why? This is a perfectly reasonable thing for sellers and buyers to negotiate about. If you want more, pay more. If you want less, pay less. That's true for any kind of market, and often many people choose to pay less to get less (sometimes you buy 1 drink at the convenience store, not a case at the grocery store, right?) So this isn't something that you make a law about, it's something that a free market works out, one where consumers are honoring their contractual obligations, not turning around and breaking them with impunity.
Implicit in society is that everyone will honor contractual agreements, and that is what makes it possible for content creators to make content available to you at all. If contracts won't be honored, expect to see more an more "walled gardens" that make accessing the underlying content difficult or impossible (by never exposing it).
This smacks of "the world owes me a success in business" fallacies; there is no requirement that if you print 5,000 copies of a record that 5,000 people have to buy it. If your product is overpriced people will spend their money elsewhere - but in the case of "IP" products there is a monopoly which means you CANNOT buy that product cheaper.
If prices are set by sellers not consumers you do not have a free market - IP laws like copyright provide a state-granted monopoly that, if it applied to anything else, would have been ridiculed as socialist interference by market participants, except in this case the market participants form a nice, cosy trust of price-fixing megacorporations who love it...
Everything you type is wrong, everything you think is right is wrong, and everything us "consumers" believe is right, because
1) THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
and
2) WE PAY YOUR MASTERS (or not, depending on personal stances)
Prices are set by the market. Sellers can ask what they want, but they can't charge higher than consumers are willing to pay. Finding the right price is a part of what marketing departments are all about. You keep forgetting that copyright protects your ability to market your project. Not you ability to actually earn anything if your product is horrid or to expensive to bother with.
Iimplicit in agreements is the ability to negotiate in good faith. Shrink wrap crap, and laws that are nothing more than the same shrink wrapped crap that we have to contend with fall short on the good faith negitiations.
As for the reasonable price. Yes physical media has something to do with it. So does what a consumer is willing to pay, and so does the medium (digital should be dirt cheap since we can't actually own it or transfer it. I'm in volation of Amazon's EULA/TOS if either fix an error in the meta data or give the gift to my kids). Marketing 101.
The reasons of course are complete and utter BS, and there is NOTHING, read NOTHING stopping you from doing exactly what you want with YOUR media. There is a software out there already that will break ANY DRM, from CD's to DVD's to BD's and HD-DVD's. As others have said, nothing will stop people from taking control from these fascists and returning it to who it belongs to: the users/viewers/etc. Let us not forget who funds the MPAA/RIAA... Ultimately it is you and I, the consumer. If only they would realize this and back off of their high horses. Only by treating we the consumers fairly and not gouging us will we accept media as it is released by these companies. Sort of a "you drop your guns and we'll drop ours" kind of thing...
Very well said!
The DMCA makes it illegal to break the copy protection. We still have the fair use right to make a back up. Hence the DMCA just made it harder to enjoy our right as a nod to the MPAA and RIAA use of copy protection to prevent both piracy and fair use rights.
You will see the DRM/Copy Protection issues get worse with Blue Ray. DVD's at least "just work". Blue Ray doesn't. You need special equipment to enjoy Blue Ray's HD.
D~W
I don't have multiple copies of my music to play on different MP3 players or CD's why in the world should I have to purchase multiple DVD's. I won't.
This won't ever solve the problems anyways. It only makes them as an example.
- by MARKWIDERSTROM April 26, 2009 3:34 AM PDT
- If I buy any media it is mine, when I tender my money it is final no more say in it its legal and tender. When I get home I can do what I want too the DINOSAUR WILL close one day due to its greed. In FACT THE DCMA IS NOT EVEN LEGAL, it was done by a president who did not know what it was or he took money from the riaa and others and then signed it.
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- by contentcreator--2008 April 26, 2009 8:03 PM PDT
- "If I buy any media it is mine, when I tender my money it is final no more say in it its legal and tender." Ignoring the grammar, you've purchased a piece of plastic. You are free to use it as a coaster, a flying disk, or shred it and use it as landfill. The incorporeal data on the disk, however, are subject to contractual licensing terms you agree to by purchasing it and opening it. It's a contract, just like for a car, house, credit card, cell phone, etc. This shouldn't be too tough for anyone to understand.
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- by JadedGamer April 27, 2009 6:48 AM PDT
- "It's a contract"
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- by darfjono April 27, 2009 7:33 AM PDT
- don't feed the troll
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- by Renegade Knight April 27, 2009 10:55 AM PDT
- @contentcreator--2008
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (44 Comments)No, it is not. There are no signatures involved, not even a "click-through" to the extent those are valid.
However, there is a law limiting what you can do with the content, yes, but that is something else. And the industry wants to trick people into believing they have less rights over the physical sopy and its contents than they really do.
if we all ignore him and his incorrect views eventually he'll get bored and go away.
The concept that "If I buy it, it's mine" isn't hard to understand either. Start there. For content to have value I have to be able to enjoy it. That's where fair use comes in. No fair use, no enjoyment, no value. It's simple.
Books, CD's, DVD's don't come with contracts. I own them. I can loan it to my friend, read it, watch it and all kinds of things that just work. Copyright (that's law) limits what I can do.
Digital content does come with a TOS that normally completely restricts anything at all resembleing the concept of "If I buy it, it's mine". Thus far they all restrict your ability to modity the file (to fix errors, or say Vista scramblign your digitla files, or to attach a rating for your song etc.) and your ability to transfer the file. Technically I can't even buy it as a gift. Amazon's terms so far as I know aren't any better or worse than anyone elses.
Media companies are working very hard to get rid of the concept of owning the media like we used to own a book or CD. Media is working hard to turn it all into pay to use rentals.