Just three weeks ago we tried to decide if we thought the RealDVD software from RealNetworks was legal or not, and concluded that if Hollywood does nothing then every other company would copy the software, which is not rocket science to achieve. So we knew they would sue, and a thinking time of three weeks seems to us long enough and the suits were filed this week.
The first one we saw reported was one from RealNetworks asking a court to declare that its software did not break the law, followed almost immediately by reports that all of the major Hollywood studios had filed collectively against RealNetworks to prevent distribution of the software.
What RealDVD does is copies the entire file over from a DVD to a hard drive, to view it later. There were immediate concerns when it launched that people would hire DVDs, copy them and play them at their leisure, further denting DVD sales revenues. It seemed like good news for Netflix. The process was described as ‘rent, rip and return.’
The suit filed in a US District Court in Los Angeles, claims the RealDVD program illegally bypasses the copyright protection built into DVDs. We have some sympathy with that view, and pointed out in our analysis that in order to work, this process would have to locate and copy a decryption key from the DVD, something that would not normally copy over if the files were copied using just any old utility. This might be interpreted by a court as amounting to a breach of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
RealNetworks argues that it is only allowing the rightful owner of a DVD to take a copy for viewing later, so this amounts to personal use, and should be allowed. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act any tampering with any protection mechanism, however flimsy, is deemed to be a crime. The truth is that once a DVD file is on the PC, it is no easier to capture a copy of the stream as it is decrypted, than if it was playing from the DVD player on the PC, so it does not promote piracy, but a court may not see it that way.
The studios asked RealNetworks not to go ahead and launch last week and when RealNetworks would not play ball, reached, as predicted, for their lawyers.