Audio Video News

A judge has issued a restraining order halting the sales of RealDVD, the DVD-copying application from RealNetworks. Well, that was quick.

The judge's move is at least a temporary victory for the Motion Picture Association of America and its member studios. However, the judge says it's just to give him time to review documents. Tomorrow he'll decide whether to continue the order.

In the meantime, the RealDVD site says: "Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable. Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use."

Both sides are using technicalities to bolster their arguments that Real has (or has not) violated DVD's CSS digital rights management. As previously reported here, Real claims the application does not actually break CSS. It merely copies the disc, including CSS, bit for bit with the decryption residing in the player.

The MPAA's counter-argument, as reported by ArsTechnica, is that RealDVD violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the following manner: "RealDVD doesn't require an actual disc to be in the drive when decrypting a movie for playback, therefore allowing users to rent, rip, and return movies. By not requiring the disc to be in the drive, Real supposedly makes 'circumvention' of the purpose of the encryption possible, even though it doesn't appear to circumvent the CSS encryption itself."

What's striking is how narrow and ambiguous these arguments are. Despite all the DRM-related legislation to follow the Supreme Court's 1984 Betamax Decision and the subsequent Audio Home Recording Act of 1992--which respectively sanctioned limited home video and audio recording for personal use--the status of DRM under copyright law is still unclear. After all, RealDVD simply allows consumers to do with DVDs what they've been doing with CDs for years, that is, rip to hard drives and bump to portable devices.

Of course, in the mind of the consumer, what technology allows, what's legal under copyright law, and what constitutes ethical behavior in a personal sense are three different things. That's why RealDVD has so many other DVD-copying cousins in the wild. The MPAA is going to have a hard time getting the genie back into the bottle.

Update: On October 7, the judge continued the restraining order and slammed RealNetworks for "rushing to market." She also postponed further hearings till November 17, so it looks as though RealDVD will continue to be unavailable.