The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has announced that once again a court has ruled against a DVD player manufacturer for violations of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) agreement. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the plaintiffs are allowed to review and test any new or re-engineered product incorporating the copy protection technology before it can make it to market.
The court issues a permanent injunction banning Gowell Electronics Ltd. from violating the CSS license agreement. It is the result of lawsuit brought against the company in June by the MPAA alleging breach of contract and it is the ninth case in which a court has sided with the MPAA members in preventing future violations of the CSS license.
The MPAA estimates that it loses $11 billion per year from the sale of pirated goods and illegal copying. CSS is a (weak) prevention against copying that was beaten a decade ago and is present on pretty much all retail DVDs on the market.
Result for: Copying
Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia have begun offering DVD movies on a new format called DVD-D which is unique because it is self-erasing.
By self erasing I mean that the content on the discs are erased exactly 8 hours after the movie is first played in any DVD player or PC drive. The timer is slightly longer for DVD-Ds that have software on them, 48 hours to be exact. The new format is available at kiosks, bookstores and gas stations for about 1/3 the price of standard retail DVDs and seem to be growing in popularity.
After the time is up, inserting the disc into a player will give you a “No Disc” error message. More interestingly, there are recordable DVD-D discs available which can be recorded at up to 8x speed and DVD-5 capacity. After ordering the blanks, the client can then “specify how long the data is to remain, having the option of one-time viewing only, or a time period of 8 hours, 48 hours or otherwise.”
It is important to note that it is unknown right now what copy protection is used on the DVD-D discs, if any or what copy protection potential clients can use to stop experienced users from copying the data to their computers. Even more importantly, the discs and packages are fully recyclable.
Result for: Copying
Yesterday we reported that NBC had sent off broadcast flags thus causing Vista Media Center users to not be able to record TV episodes of “American Gladiators” and “Medium” on Monday night.
After these reports surfaced around the internet, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that the same exact thing was happening to over-the-air (OTA) programming, something it had not seen before.
One individual report shows a man attempting to record TV shows from NBC’s Raleigh affiliate, WNCN HD, and having an alert tell him “the broadcaster has disabled recording of the programming.” The man was recording from an antenna signal and EFF confided that it was the first it had ever heard of OTA programming being restricted.
Broadcast flags, which come part of the upcoming 2009 DTV standard, were challenged in court two years ago by the EFF and the court ruled in favor saying “that using the flags to restrict copying was not appropriate”. The law was subsequently thrown out. The panel of judges said the FCC did not have the authority to enforce a law of that nature, which is a clear violation of fair use laws.
The EFF then added that Microsoft was voluntarily adopting broadcast flags into its software, as other similar programs now ignore them and have no trouble recording programming even if it is flagged.
“If it is a deliberate ‘feature,’ they have some explaining to do,” EFF international outreach coordinator Danny O’Brien said. “That would amount to putting the desires of content holders above the best interests of its customers.”
