August 10, 2004 9:15 AM PDT
MPAA wins settlement in DVD copy case
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The settlement, announced Tuesday, concludes more than two years of courtroom wrestling over the legality of 321's DVD-copying software, which ultimately led federal judges in New York and California to order the product removed from store shelves.
On Friday, 321 closed its doors, saying the succession of court decisions had forced it to stop selling or supporting its products.
The St. Louis-based company had cast itself as a test case of controversial provisions in copyright law that make it illegal to distribute software that breaks through digital copy protections.
321 claimed that its Copy Plus software made lower-quality DVD copies for people to back up their movie collections. However, most commercial DVDs come wrapped in a copy protection mechanism that prevents that kind of backup.
In a pre-emptive move against Hollywood, 321 filed a lawsuit in April 2002, asking the court to declare its software acceptable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
However, the studios filed their own lawsuit against 321 in December 2002, after the company released its DVD X Copy software, which makes exact duplicates of DVDs.
The MPAA heralded Tuesday's settlement as a victory in its fight against digital piracy.
"321 Studios built its business on the flawed premise that it could profit from violating the motion picture studios' copyrights. The courts have been amply clear: There is no leniency for violating federal copyright laws," Jack Valenti, chief executive of the MPAA, said in a statement.
CNET News.com's John Borland contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
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copy protection,
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This software isn't just about piracy, it's about protecting your investment in those DVD's. We did it with VHS tapes, we should be able to do it with over priced DVD's, too.
In contrast, I could go out front to my car and I bet 50% of the CD's laying around my car are damaged and skip.
Burned CD's have a short lifespan of only about a month in my car.
Whether you disable macrovision or break through the copy protection system on the actual DVD itself, you still run foul of the law, especially the flawed DMCA.
I am all for adequate protection of copyrighted material. However if the Hollywood studios are truly serious about keeping their ownership of their content, and not seeing the same mass distribution as the music industry has, they had better listen to public opinion.
The easiest solution would be to build in a limited number of copies solution to the actual disk - providing the backup software themselves - on the DVD. This way they could control the situation.
People are generally lazy, and if it's easiers, and cost effective enough, to just use a legitimate method of backing up the disk, then they will usually do it that way.
But if the only method available is the one that allows (illegaly) unlimited copies to be made of the same disk, then that's what's going to happen.
In the next few years we're going to have a broadband system that will copy a DVD in seconds. No amount of copy protection will stop these movies from being ripped from the disk and downloaded on an anonymous peer to peer system.
If the movie studios don't act now to allow legal backups, then they will suffer the same massive piracy that the music industry does today - and will have no real way to stop it.
The chilling effect this has is already starting to circulate. Why else is Roxio getting rid of the entirety of their software division for basically chump change (a mere $80 million) and concentrating on the now-legal Napster? What does Roxio realize that Sonic Solutions (the company buying Roxio's software products) does not viz. the MPAA?
In fact, there will be only *two* mainstream companies in the DVD creation marketplace for consumers, Sonic Solutions and AHEAD (whose NERO Burning ROM is the closest thing to Roxio's own Easy Media Creator on the PC side of the street).
While the RIAA has gotten a clue (audio extraction is included in freely available PC products, including Windows Media Play and the competing RealPlayer; in fact, RealPlayer Basic now offers both high-bitrate *and* variable-bitrate options free!), the MPAA is defending Macrovision more viciously than the British Beefeaters defend the Crown Jewels!
Sonic Solutions, watch your back.