Andre Yoskowitz
11 Oct 2008 17:59
According to the EFF, the recent Hollywood suit against RealDVD is nothing more than a smokescreen aimed not at piracy but instead at stifling innovation.
"It has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with controlling innovation," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF's senior attorney.
The suit contends that RealNetwork's RealDVD software is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as a breach of contract with the DVD Copy Control Association.
RealNetworks claims that the software "allows consumers to securely store, manage and play their DVDs on their computers" and "does not enable users to distribute copies of their DVDs." It also mentions that RealDVD adds another layer of DRM to the ripped movies which makes it much harder to move to films off the computer that has the program installed.
The MPAA however told a judge that users simply need to start a Netflix account and they will build up huge movie libraries while paying only a monthly fee for the rental service. This "rent, copy, return" scenario would (clearly) cost the movie studios billions per year, noted the MPAA. Von Lohmann also adds however that there are a plethora of "DVD rippers" currently available online that allow users to copy DVDs to their hard drives, and those software have no DRM, unlike RealDVD.
"Hollywood can't possibly believe that the $30, DRM-hobbled RealDVD software represents a piracy threat," von Lohmann wrote. "The studios are using the lawsuit to send a message about what happens to those who innovate without permission in a post-DMCA world."
Any licensing agreement tech companies sign before making movie players are simply a means of control for the studios, added von Lohmann. "The licenses define what the devices can and can't do thereby protecting Hollywood business models from disruptive innovation," he said.
"In the course of these years-long negotiations, Hollywood has managed to wrest several important concessions from technology vendors," von Lohmann wrote. These "include requiring that computers do watermark detection to spot pirated copies when reading data from Blu-ray discs, and imposing DRM on resulting copies."
RealDVD is such a huge threat to the studios because it does not require a license, thus keeping Hollywood at bay.
"By reading the existing CSS license carefully," von Lohmann wrote, "Real found a way to create a new product category without first getting permission from the Hollywood studios."
Von Lohmann concludes that he believes the studios aren't against the backing up of DVDs, just that they want a cut of the revenue of any such product.