[Infowarrior] - Proposed Amendment Would Ban All DVD Copying

[Richard Forno]

 Proposed Amendment Would Ban All DVD Copying
06.20.07
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2148802,00.asp
    

By Mark Hachman

A proposed amendment to the current copy protection license governing DVDs
would completely ban all DVD backups, and prevent DVD playback without the
DVD disk being present inside the drive.

The proposed amendment was made public in a letter sent by Michael Malcolm,
the chief executive of Kaleidescape, a DVD jukebox company which
successfully defeated a suit by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA)
this past March. The proposed amendment is scheduled for a vote on
Wednesday, according to Malcolm.

A spokesman for the CCA said he was not aware of the proposed amendment, but
added that he could not comment until the CCA had finished its
deliberations. A spokeswoman for Kaleidescape said she understood that a
final decision could take weeks, if not months.

The amendment is currently being considered by the Content Protection
Advisory Council (CPAC) of the DVD CCA. If enacted, it would become binding
in 18 months from the date on which the CCA notified its licensees, which
include DVD hardware and software manufacturers.

The terms of the amendment, formally referred to as the "Unknown
Specification Amendment," are just a paragraph long, and would basically
eliminate DVD copying of any form, whether for the purposes of fair use or
not.

The amendment reads:

"6.4. Certain Requirements for DVD Products. DVD Products, alone or in
combination with other DVD Products, shall not be designed to descramble
scrambled CSS Data when the DVD Disc containing such CSS Data and associated
CSS Keys is not physically present in the DVD Player or DVD Drive (as
applicable), and a DVD Product shall not be designed to make or direct the
making of a persistent copy of CSS Data that has been descrambled from such
DVD Disc by such DVD Product."

The amendment was proposed by Chris Cookson of Warner Bros., Ben Carr of
Walt Disney Studios, Jeffrey Lawrence of Intel, Gabe Beged-Dov of
Hewlett-Packard, David Harshman of Toshiba, and Andy Parsons of Pioneer
Electronics, according to Malcolm as well as the attached letter proposing
the amendment, and signed by the legal counsel representing the signatories.

To Malcolm, the proposed amendment was designed to put Kaleidescape out of
business, and represented an unfair monopoly that should be broken up. The
letter was addressed to several members of the Federal Trade Commission, key
members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Department of
Justice staffers, EU regulatory bodies, and the chief executives of the
companies the amendment signatories are employed by, as well as industry
executives like Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

"The real purpose of this proposed amendment is to put Kaleidescape out of
business by excluding the Kaleidescape System from the DVD playback devices
authored by the CSS License Agreement," Malcolm wrote. "You should be aware
before you vote on the proposed amendment that you expose yourself, your
employer and the DVD CCA to serious and substantial antitrust liability if
you vote for this amendment. Both state and federal laws outlaw
anticompetitive conduct by businesses joining together to put a competitor
out of business."

The DVD CCA has previously tried twice to add "managed copy" provisions to
its licensing agreement, and both times the vote has failed, according to
reports. Managed copies would either transfer the CSS key to the recordable
DVD, which would require an additional CSS "replicator" license, or else use
what is called "pre-keyed" media, which would include the CSS key already as
part of the disc structure.

The proposed amendment would apparently add hardware restrictions to prevent
DVD data from being descrambled and then copied. To date, that provision has
been effectively enforced by litigation, which has effectively prevented
mainstream software companies from copying or "backing up" DVD movies. A
number of independent software developers, however, have published utilities
or other applications for "ripping" DVD movies.

The proposed amendment would also prohibit software manufacturers to create
"virtual drives," running a DVD image from a hard drive. The previous
Kaleidescape case touched upon the company's use of ripping a DVD to a large
internal hard drive, and playing back the movie on demand without the need
for a physical disk to be inserted into the drive.

In the previous ruling settling the Kaleidescape-DVD CCA dispute, Judge
Leslie C. Nichols of the Santa Clara Superior Court merely stated that the
company had met its obligations to the CCA under its license agreement,
without addressing the broader issue of fair use.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated at 4:20 PM PDT with comments from
both the DVD CCA as well as Kaleidescape.