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MPAA vs RealDVD -- Why You Care
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is suing to stop RealPlayer's RealDVD from being sold to computer owners. RealDVD lets you make backup copies of your movie DVDs onto your computer. It doesn't let you make new DVDs or share the files from your computer with others -- it just lets you keep for yourself a backup. MPAA says this means computer users "steal" movies.
Why do you care? This affects you because it is another case of big corporations using their ability to influence our government to gain financial advantages that cost us money and convenience.
The MPAA sues people and companies that they say are "stealing" their movies. Of course within reason this is necessary and proper. But in their efforts to protect movie company profits, MPAA has been going too far, acting similarly to the infamous Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the recording industry group that sues anyone they suspect may have downloaded a tune, in order to make an example of them. (See MPAA Sues Grandfather for $600,000. His 12-year-old son had downloaded a movie.)
But fear that people are "stealing" may not be the real reason behind this lawsuit. In Why Hollywood Hates RealDVD, Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann writes that this is about a strategy to force Real and others to pay license fees to MPAA when they come up with new technologies. He writes that MPAA's position,
". . . forces technology companies to enter into license agreements before they build products that can play movies. . . . Those license agreements, in turn, define what the devices can and can't do, thereby protecting Hollywood business models from disruptive innovation."
This fight traces back to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA limits how technology can be used, even limiting researchers from studying various kinds of computer encryption and other algorithms. Basically, it says that companies can't make products that enable people to distribute their own copies of copyrighted material. Copyrighted music and movies contain code that tells the computer that this file can't be copied, and computers and programs have to contain code that recognizes this.
Copyright, according to our constitution, is intended to "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts". The idea was to grant a legal monopoly on profiting from this kind of work for a few years to provide an incentive and reward for scientific research and creativity. This means the government uses its power to stop competition. As it applies to the arts this is how authors, musicians, filmmakers and others are able to make a living at all and that is why it is in the Constitution. But like so many corporate-inspired distortions of our laws and values in the last several years, the DMCA is primarily about benefiting big, established corporations and blocking rather than promoting innovation. In fact, when used like this it stifles innovation.
Something we have seen in recent years is businesses misusing legal tactics to increase profits. In other words, using their money-bought influence over our government to get special favors such as tax breaks, subsidies, grants of monopolies, "no-bid" contracts, etc.
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace. In 1999 he said, "This is law and code conspiring to tilt market forces quite decidedly in one direction rather than another."
More recently Lessig has written
". . . when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive."
So here we have MPAA suing to block people from being able to get the RealDVD program, which lets people keep a backup on their own computer in case their DVD gets scratched or lost. (Unless they pay MPAA licensing fees - wink wink, nod nod.) MPAA also wants to make people buy new DVDs. But people want to make backups in case they scratch or lose their DVDs.
This case comes to court soon, keep an eye on it.
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Has anyone noticed that some DVD cases seem designed to scratch and maybe even break the DVD? All the companies EXCEPT Criterion seem to be kinda sketchy in their packaging at times.
Not really. I had exactly one scratched DVD, but a simple repair kit from Target fixed it up.
so what if mpaa stops realdvd. this application ripped the drm anyways. you can easily get freeware that will rip a dvd without the drm. this is a non issue.
the riaa and mpaa can go pound sand for abusing their customer base.
Honestly, never in my life had I felt the need to make a backup of a DVD to protect it from scratches. Just saying that makes me laugh. If you're going to criticize one side of the table, make sure your side is on the up and up.
Yeah, why can't the entertainment industry understand that they're not allowed to receive any sort of compensation for their creations? It's not like the Thirteenth Amendment applies to singers or actors or writers or anything.
The problem is that people don't use this software to "back up" anything, which has become a euphamism for piracy
Maybe 2% of people, and that's being generous
I personally know dozens of people with closets full of DVD-R cakeboxes. They rent 3 from netflix. Rip without watching send them back, acquiring up to 12 movies a week. These are piracy tools only, and with tools to distribute anything far and wide getting easier and easier to use, it's the only way to stop it
When you had to dupe tapes in real time, you're limited to thousands of copies. There are plenty of shows like Naruto or Prison Break that a single torrent will reach half a million downloads in a 24 hour period. The same goes for movies.
How many do they actually watch? If there no means to copy, how many would they actually buy? If they're copied and put in a box, does that impact anyone?
The CD and DVD industries looked at the decline in sales and attributed that to a one-for-one reduction in sales for each CD or DVD copied. It's specious accounting at best.
The weakening of that market is because there is simply more to do and more to be done. There is a limited amount of time available for entertainment, diversions, and activities like that. Anything that takes from that time budget takes provides an alternative to CD or DVD sales. Examples of this are:
- Cell phones
- Internet
- HuffingtonPost
- Social networking sites
- Working too much to have time for it
- Not working enough to have money for it
- Video games
- Who knows what else
Additionally, there are market reasons - good local college stations that support local and independent artists, commercial stations that endlessly play the same thing over and over, cable TV, satelliteTV - they all make for less need to buy anything.
I would like to establish a class action suit to DEMAND a DVD be sent and available for EVERY MOVIE I purchase on ANY format - after all , I DID "only" PURCHASE the "movie" copyright and it's use according to RIAA . . .
if they wish to maintain CONTROL AFTER PURCHASE, I as a "purchaser" should have to right to lifetime unlimited rights to "personal use", if I can't archive, provide an replacement . . . the MEDIA format seems to be the issue . . . no problem, replace may tape, CD, DVD "collection of rights" ANYTIME the distribution system no longer supports the medium I "park" my purchased rights on.
Anyone care to join or represent me?
The MPAA truly believes that it should've won the Betamax lawsuit, and doesn't want anyone copying ANYTHING. Therefore it follows that one of two things must happen: The MPAA must either disband, or get rid of the ghost of Jack Valenti. The former probably won't happen in my lifetime, therefore, we can only pray for the latter....
I got a better idea: what say you write a movie worth paying United States dollars for?
I'd bet Matches could probably do a better job than the crapola that's peddled by the MPAA nowadays, anyway!
Johnson and Lessig have completely missed the point. It is true that protecting copyright imposes some limits. Every protection in life is in some ways also a limitation. You can't jaywalk because cars use the same road - etc. The real problem with RealDVD is not making backup copies - that's just Real's spin. The problem is that it allows you to make backup copies of someone else's DVDs, too. The ones you didn't pay for. And the ones you get on your $8.95 per month NetFlix subscription. Maybe Mr. Von Lohmann has a point that the studios get money for their movies and maybe he has some system where he thinks they should do it all for free. Or that YouTube should get the content for free and keep the money from the ads. Lessig has no alternative method for transacting commerce - he'd prefer to just tax everyone and have the government pay creators. In Mr. Lessig's world, if a protection measure is needed to avoid massive piracy, to allow movies, television shows, books and blogs to exist, BUT would cause one person to suffer the indignity of having to go to the record store to replace a defective DVD, then rights have been infringed and we should organize a demonstration. Let's restore some balance to this and understand that creators - songwriters, performers, moviemakers and so many others - deserve to be free from piracy and IF they connect with their audiences, they deserve to get paid.
Wow, being able to watch a movie that you own is "piracy"? I had no idea.
The idea behind RealDVD is no different from having an LP you love, recording the LP onto a CD, and playing the CD in your car CD player on trips. (Or is that now illegal too?)
In theory, John Q. Citizen has copyright-law rights, too -- they're called "Fair Use." The MPAA is trying to use the letter of the DCMA to deny DVD owners their Fair Use rights. Piracy? Poppycock.
Pixel is naive if he thinks that if the MPAA wins this RealDVD suit, that "songwriters, performers, moviemakers, and so many others" will see one dime. Because the fact is, the MPAA's sister organization, the RIAA, has shared NONE of its lawsuit-gained largesse with the songwriters and performers in whose behalf it supposedly acted.
Fair Use only comes in play when you're quoting or sampling something, not using the entire work in question.
No mention of the DVD Copy Control Association? They've licensed CSS to DVD-burning kiosks. So they, and the MPAA, may not necessarily be against sharing the tech and permitting archiving. (Before HD DVD was killed, Windows Vista archiving was demo-ed/pitched by Microsoft at CES.) But they didn't produce, validate, or vette Real's protection scheme. And it's not Real's technology to use without license. Having said that, I do agree many large companies are overzealous in claiming DMCA violations that appear to trump pre-existing fair use protections. (In fact, I'm tired of BS YouTube takedown notices.) At the end of the day, most folks who want to archive their DVDs already know how. (Basically, I don't see a market for Real's software.) And I don't see individual consumers, who don't share their files on BitTorrent, being dragged into court for bypassing an encryption scheme or stealing.
Well, this is another infringement on the fair use doctrine.
This is akin to the RIAA's belief that nobody should be able to use blank tapes to record cd's on for use in the car but that consumers should buy a pre-recorded tape (on the record industry's, imho, near bootleg quality tape stock) for that.
Both the MPAA and the RIAA are totally devoid of any sense of reality and they just alienate consumers, which is why I haven't acquired any music in years. Instead, I just listen to internet radio when I want to hear new music.
Well, this is another misinterpretation of how copyright law really works by self-entitled Napsterites who don't understand that they entered into a licensing agreement when they took the cellophane shrinkwrap off the item in question.
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