Media Server Vendor Kaleidescape Wins Legal Decision Against DVD Copy Control Association
Posted Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:15:55 EDT by Michael Wolf
One of the legal suits I'd been watching with interest recently (there seems to be more and more of them lately), was the one where the DVD Copy Control Association brought suit againt Kaleidescape, a high-end media server vendor for homes (and by home I meant yacht - company officials tell me they've done quite a few of these, not to mention "two Airbus's and one Boeing"). In the suit, the DVD group, which oversees the CSS license (CSS is the very breakable DVD copy protection scheme), says Kaleidescape violates the agreement because they create copies of the DVDs on a hard drive. For its part, Kaleidescape says it has paid a number of licensing fees and that its implementation is not explicitly forbidden under the CSS license agreement.
It turns out the judge in the case has sided with Kaleidescape. I tend to think that the lawsuit was fairly silly, especially given that the media server company's technology actually provides security technology that is much more robust than that of CSS, and ripped versions of movies on a Kaleidescape server are likely never to be passed outside of the vendors own proprietary systems. Still, this judgement could be an important landmark case for future media server/ripping lawsuits, though it is likely that another judge may not look as kindly upon less secure implementations which involve transferring copies of movies from their disc format to a hard drive.