OPINION: Question of legality
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 9/12/2008
SEPT. 12 | ON ONE LEVEL, RealNetworks’ announcement last week of a software program for coping DVDs to a hard drive or portable storage medium—RealDVD—was no big deal.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
Ever since 16-year-old Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen unleashed DeCSS on the world in 1999, there have been programs that let you copy encrypted DVDs. One more, even from a reputable company like Real, hardly seems like a game-changer.
But precisely because RealDVD does come from RealNetworks—whose ubiquitous video player will be familiar to nearly any Internet user and often comes pre-installed on new PCs—and because of the way the program operates, it presents a very serious and tricky challenge to the studios.
For starters, DeCSS and its progeny are all clearly illegal products. They work by disabling or circumventing the CSS encryption used to control a playback device’s ability to access the data on commercial DVDs (thus “De-CSS”). Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal to circumvent access control measures or to “traffic in” circumvention technologies.
RealNetworks, however, claims that RealDVD is entirely legal.
Like Microsoft, Apple and other distributors of commercial DVD playback software, RealNetworks is licensed to use CSS. Its player contains the keys needed to legally decrypt CSS-encoded content during playback.
RealDVD, therefore, doesn’t need to illegally circumvent CSS because it is authorized to decrypt the content legally. It then copies the decrypted content to the hard drive, where it is re-encrypted to prevent further copying.
RealNetworks contends that since no unauthorized circumvention is going on, RealDVD does not fall afoul of the DMCA.
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
