The major movie studios told a US federal judge in San Francisco today that new software from RealNetworks threatens serious harm to the DVD sales that are a major source of their profits.
The $30 RealDVD program allows users to make backup copies of commercial DVDs and store them on their hard drives, which on the surface is the type of activity that courts have determined to be “fair use.”
But Disney, Sony, News Corp. and the other big studios point out that the software could also be used to make copies of rented or borrowed DVDs, making outright purchases unnecessary.
“Why pay $18.50 for a DVD if the same content can be copied permanently for the two dollars (or less) it costs to rent the movie?” the studios said in a court filing arguing that the software “fundamentally changes the economic equation of buying DVDs”.
So far, the studios seem to have the upper hand. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel temporarily blocked RealNetworks from selling the program in September, not long after the product’s debut. On Friday, they argued before her in pursuit of a preliminary injunction to keep that ban in force.
The movie companies said that RealNetworks knows full well that its customers would use the program to copy what they don’t own, quoting CEO Rob Glaser’s comment that “If you want to steal, we remind you what the rules are and we discourage you from doing it, but we’re not your nanny.”
The suit accuses RealNetworks of breaching its licensing agreement to use DVD technology in a mere player and of running afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids evading such rights-management tools as the CSS encryption on DVDs.
RealNetworks’ counter-accusations include the argument that the studios are misusing copyrights by making it impossible for consumers to fully enjoy what they’ve paid for.
The fight resumes next week.
