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Court Battle Raging Over Right To Back Up DVDs
I’ve said it 1000 times before, but let me preface this post by saying it again. I am 100% against piracy. Piracy is theft no matter how you try to justify it. Pure an simple. You are stealing the creative work of others that someone has invested small fortunes in and there is no excuse you can give that makes it “ok” to do it. That being said, the Motion Picture Association of America have made jackasses out of themselves by how they’ve chosen over the years to try to enforce anti-piracy laws. Prosecuting teenage kids, going after parents, treating everyone like they’re criminals without ever actually addressing the real core reasons for piracy.
One of the things I’ve really HATED is how the MPAA has been fighting for years to stop you and me… law abiding citizens and costumers… from legally making backups of the DVDs we LEGALLY PURCHASE. DVD are fragile things, and if I slap down money to buy your stupid product, I want to be able to safe keep it and back it up. I’m not a pirate!!! If I was I wouldn’t have bought your damn DVD in the first place.
Anyway, a court battle is raging right now in this fight between the Hollywood studios and RealNetworks, a company that has a piece of software to help you backup your DVDs to your computer. Yahoo News gives us this:
If RealNetworks wins, it could establish a beachhead for software that transfers movies from DVDs to hard drives, opening the door for many companies to sell devices that can store and organize movies from DVDs. RealNetworks began selling “RealDVD” for $30 at the end of September, but only a few thousand copies were out the door before it wound up in court. Judge Patel temporarily halted sales in October.
Now the judge is considering a preliminary injunction against the Seattle-based software company. RealNetworks lawyer Len Cunningham argued that the studios had their own products which provide for backups, called digitalcopy. “They have aggressively marketed it,” he said. “The threat (to Hollywood) is for legitimate competition.” The judge interjected: “They have the copyright.” Cunningham argued that DVD owners have a “fair use” right to make copies of their own DVDs. But Reginald Steer of the DVD group said the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 had overtaken that argument.
RealNetworks says the software can be used with one hard drive and only five devices, such as laptops or televisions. That would prevent it from getting on the Internet or being handed off from one friend to another, they say.
The last paragraph is the part I don’t get. If RealNetworks has made this software with built in protection to stop people from sharing the files with other people… what the hell is the problem here? This is frigging ridiculous.
If the MPAA want to fight piracy, then they should be working with companies like RealNetworks to make the software available… not fight against it. They should be making owning movies easier and easier rather than fighting to take away our rights to protect and back up the things we buy from them. Taking away that ability just makes it more tempting to pirate stuff. Frigging ignorant morons.
i agree on that last part about it making it more tempting to pirate films
It’s my right to protect the product that I pay for, if that means backing it up then I’ll do so if I damn well please.
And it’s not like they are going to stop anything if they win, which I doubt. There are countless of programs out there that make this doable for free.
The logic that the MPAA is using is that this leads to piracy, which it does but at the same time, why not outlaw scanners and photocopiers because they can copy books. What about VCR’s and DVD players with hard drives? What about Tivo?
Indeed, until DVD’s are made of near indestructible material instead of flimsy plastic that renders them useless with but a simple scratch I will choose to make backups of my personal DVD’s as well. If I am to be labeled a pirate for such transgressions….. then argh matey, send me to the gallows!
Hey, don’t give them any ideas.
This happened already with DVDXCopy. The company was shut down for giving you the ability to back up your dvds.
I make backups of my kids movies so that WHEN they trash them (I gave up on thinking “if”) I don’t have to spill another $30 because it was a Disney flick. I already bought Mulan and Toy Story twice.. I learned my lesson.
The real issue here isn’t if they win or lose. There is already free software online that will let you back stuff up. They can sue these guys into oblivion, it won’t solve the problem.
Funny that the government will take the tools of this illegal action away, but still allow people to own guns.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Backups dont cause piracy, people cause piracy.
If I paid for it I have the right to do whatever I want with it! I just recently transferred my dvd collection to my computer so I can stream them to my xbox 360 saves me physical space and time, and if I want I can put them on my Zune. That digitalcopy thing is a joke! It has so much copy protection on it you cant watch the damn thing. Cant put it on my Zune cant stream to the xbox, come on its easier for me to do it my self.
Agreed, we’re paying for a slice and now they are trying to tell us how to eat it? Most of the piracy I see are the people recording it in the theater and later selling it on the streets or posting it online themselves. Though I doubt movie theaters will be putting metal detectors towards their entrances from now on.
The RIAA are extremely contradictory when it comes to this issue…
- On one hand they remind us we don’t “own” anything but instead we’re just licensing a copy from them.
- On the other hand they tell us we cannot make a backup because that is piracy. Even though we own a license.
They can’t have it both ways. Seems to me that since this piracy thing got popular the only people who have suffered are the legal consumers court in the crossfire.
We wind up with these unskippable “stop piracy” adverts on our DVDs just before the unskippable ten minutes of trailers that will be out of date within a week of you buying the disk.
While they add a bunch of software to music CDs to break those too and make online services so expensive or cumbersome they aren’t worth using.
I think this clip from The IT Crowd sums things up nicely:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wRxfz_6E7o
Yes, lol. Just love the IT Crowd, the family went zonkers over that clip. BBC tele at its best IMO.
Once the film companies seriously look at competing in a market where piracy exists maybe we’ll see piracy decline. Right now it seems that overcharging for a DVD/Film is acceptable and that’s why piracy is prevalent.
Don’t forget that they keep reselling us the SAME product in different packaging. I used to own over 400 VHS tapes, and it hit me in about 1999 that I didn’t really own anything, and I would have to replace my movie collection with DVDs and then the next generation, and the next, and so on and so on…We’re all headed toward true digital on demand, where we won’t “own” anything. (not to mention, that I’m sure the studios will add minimal content and sell 20th anniversary editions of, directors cuts, remastered blah blah blah….I’m not against them making money, it is a business after all, but it’s the after box office release that I chafe at. Not to mention having to watch commercials while I wait for the movie to start at the BO.
The MPAA are just stupid. They can’t see the forest through the trees. The issue is NOT about “Piracy”. It is about how you can regulate your product to the consumers. These retards are holding on to a old business model tighter only than their own assholes. They are thinking only of ways to block their product from reaching their costumers. This is not the age of limited media outlets. there is a huge amount of choices out there. A person like me has to decide what is worth my time or not. I don’t HAVE to see the wolverine movie. The choices of things to do disregarding all other activity and just on media based entertainment alone is overwhelming. There are enough movies and games out there to last me 100 years. Hollywood can no long hold on to their movies like they are the last drop of water in the desert. Greater access of product by the consumer will increase quality of the product and generate better, more effective profit margins for the entire movie business.
This is what happens when we agree to not own anything. You don’t buy movies. You buy a license to watch movies. Also I have a hard time being against piracy when I have quadruple dipped on certain movies.
maybe the studios don’t want us to make backups. instead, they want us to shell out for another copy of their dvd… MPAA sucks at fighting piracy!
I don’t see a problem with it. I look at my DVD collection. I ask, should I have a backup of anything there…
Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have a backup of the Criterion Collection Edition of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, which is the two discer with three audio commentaries, the film processing and editing demonstrations among other sweet features.
A version that is right now, as I write this, out of print.
I could find a “regular” version of Traffic on DVD or Blu-Ray, this is true. But for now, that loaded second disc does not come with the current DVD/Blu Ray prints of the film.
In fact, (and I don’t know why they do this) some studios re-issue DVDs combining them with “another” film, dropping the extras and/or the widescreen editions. Now I do have a slight smile on my face, knowing my purchased DVD of, say, Bloodsport is in a widescreen format. However, let’s say I want to have a backup of my widescreen edition of Bloodsport just so I have it because if something happened to the disc I bought, I would not have to buy one with less features/inferior quality. (I consider the triple dipped ‘double feature’ discs with less features and/or 1:33 inferior)
Maybe ‘Batman’ is on to something up there.
In either case, both “backups” are done for my own personal use/enjoyment. I am not pirating. I am not breaking the law.
*** Is there another unsung problem?***
How many of us have home movies on DVD? We took our camcorders and filmed the family member showing Spot the dog how to fetch the stick. Or your wedding day. Something special that is personal to you. We put our films on DVD, or transferred our VHS home movies to DVD.
With this device, we have backups of these things. While there are some businesses that could provide such services- if we can do it ourselves…
Piracy isn’t a theft. Theft removes the original. Piracy makes a copy and leaves the original. :)
Hey Huggybear,
No disrespect intended man, but that’s total bullshit and just something people who pirate stuff tell themselves to try to justify it.
People invest time, energy, creativity and loads of money into producing movies so that they can be sold as an intellectual consumable. So when you take it without paying for it, you’re stealing. Period.
Let’s say you worked at the auto factory building cars. You work your ass off… but someone figures out how to sneak onto the lot and just “clone” the cars you built and never have to buy one. How long before the auto maker goes broke and you lose your job? Will you still agree with the pirate when he tells you to your unemployed face he never stole anything?
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