US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued a permanent injunction barring RealNetworks from selling its DVD copying software RealDVD, and a new settlement in the case has finally signaled an end to the copyright lawsuit brought by Hollywood
Facet, the RealDVD player that was supposed to be able to copy DVDs and house up to 70 digital film copies at once, is also getting scrapped.
Real and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have also reached a settlement in which Real agreed to not sell RealDVD or any products with the same capabilities, and Real will reimburse the studios $4.5 million for legal fees.
Daniel Mandil, the MPAA’s general counsel, said the ruling affirms that for Real and any other similar systems, "it is illegal to bypass the copyright protections built into DVDs designed to protect movies against theft."
Real’s argument from the beginning was that customers have the right to back up their content, much as many do with digital copies of CDs. When the case began in 2008, this wasn’t initially viewed as a strong argument, and the judge put a temporary restriction on Real from selling anything containing its RealDVD software.
The restrictions here are tough to understand because they appear to set a very blatant double standard for digital music and video copyrights. Despite some reports, these personal-use issues aren’t what is mainly at stake here; it was largely a case about contract issues that tried to evolve into loftier ideals.
The big problem for Real came from its DVD licenses and contracts, which it violated. Real removed the anti-copying protections its contract required by actively making a workaround for the ARccOS and RipGuard securities. These are two third-party technologies that add small errors into DVDs to keep them from being accurately copied.
RealDVD added on DRM protections to the copies it made but still circumvented the requirements of its licensing. Judge Patel said that US law does not restrict or stop users from creating backups, but it does make tools that create backups unlawful unless they have the proper agreements and licensing. |
