Mentioning DVD movies and copying in the same sentence is pretty well guaranteed to raise eyebrows, if not hackles, among Hollywood’s movie moguls. Launch a product that promises to make it simple and easy for DVD owners to copy their movies onto a PC disk drive and it is a fair bet that the lawyers from the Motion Picture Association of America will sit up and take notice.
Well that is exactly what Real Networks did this week at the Demo conference in San Diego when it launched Real DVD, a $30 program that will be available before the end of the month. Rob Glasier, Real’s chief executive, who had a cameo part in the Demo presentation, insists RealDVD is totally legitimate.
Real believes it has sidestepped the legal minefield that sank St Louis-based 321 Studios, developers of the popular program DVD X Copy. 321 Studios was forced to shut down in 2004 after a judge ruled that its software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since then, DVD pirates have been forced to rely on illicit DVD copy software.
Unlike many of these programs, RealDVD does not break the DVD copy-protection technology intended to the thwart such piracy. Instead Real Networks has licensed the official DVD copy-protection scheme and built it into RealDVD. As a result Real claims its program is simply a software DVD player.
RealDVD also includes a number of other restrictions which appear designed to appease the MPAA. Among them, RealDVD users can only make one copy of the original, and this copy is only playable only on the computer where it was made.
The MPAA has yet to comment on the new software, but its response is likely to be tempered by the outcome of another lawsuit.
In March last year, the DVD Copy Control Association, the alliance that licenses the encryption for DVDs, lost a lawsuit against Kaleidescape, a Silicon Valley start-up which sells a $10,000 music server that enables its owners to copy, store and playback up to 500 movies from the server’s hard drive.
The DVD association has appealed against the ruling, but Real Networks believes the decision has created a framework for a legal DVD copying product, provided it incorporates adequate restrictions to prevent piracy.
