In a curiously ambiguous ruling, a federal court has declared the RealDVD disc copying application illegal. However, the court also left open the possibility that copying DVDs for personal use may be legal in some circumstances under the copyright law's fair use doctrine.

Back during the analog TV era, a well-regarded manufacturer offered me a rear-projection set—not for review, just for my own use. I turned it down. I didn’t want one of those big, butt-ugly things in my living room. In later years, RPTV went high def, slimmed down, and became the best buy in big-screen TV in terms of inches per dollar. But that wasn’t enough to save it. In the closing jingle-bell months of last year, the one remaining RPTV manufacturer pulled the plug, and the product category quietly passed into history.

Pioneer will unveil its first BD recorders before March 2009.

You've probably heard about Warner's Red2Blu program--Scott Wilkinson covered it in our News section. It enables consumers who bought HD DVDs to upgrade them to Blu-ray versions of the same titles for $4.95 plus shipping charges of $6.95-8.95. What you may not have heard is that the upgrade may result in a standard edition being replaced by a deluxe boxed set. Our colleague (and former convergence editor) Chris Chiarella writes: "If you swap out your Casablanca, you'll actually be upgrading to the crazy-cool Ultimate Collector's Edition. I believe that this fancy boxed set is the only BD version offered in the U.S., and while I was poking around the Warner Red2Blu microsite I clicked on Casablanca and the UCE appeared in my cart specifically, by name." So now you have more than one potential reason to pay the few bucks to go Blu. Sweet deal!