[Infowarrior] - DVD-CCA Targets Kaleidescape (Again)

[Richard Forno]

Why DRM on Video Will Persist: DVD-CCA Targets Kaleidescape (Again)
Posted by Fred von Lohmann
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11/why-drm-video-will-persist-dvd-cca-targ
ets-kaleidescape-again

As we've said many times before, DRM is not about preventing piracy, it's
about giving entertainment companies control over disruptive innovation.
Here's the latest example: tomorrow DVD-CCA (the entity that controls the
CSS encryption standard for DVDs) will be voting on an amendment to the CSS
license that is designed to put a disruptive innovator, Kaleidescape, out of
business (read Kaleidescape's letter about it here).

As everyone knows, CSS has been broken for years, and despite early lawsuits
against products like DeCSS and DVD X Copy, easy-to-use DVD copying software
remains available for free from many sources online (the print magazine
MacWorld reviews one of them, Handbrake, in this month's issue). Yet despite
the fact that CSS has been reduced to a joke as a bar against DVD ripping,
movie studios continue to embrace it, using it on every commercial DVD
release. Why? Because by using CSS, the movie studios (acting through
DVD-CCA) can force technology companies to sign a license agreement before
they build anything that can decrypt a DVD movie.

This gives the movie studios unprecedented power to influence the pace and
nature of innovation in the world of DVDs. Any new feature (like copying to
a hard drive) must first pass muster in the 3-way "inter-industry"
negotiation (movie studios, incumbent consumer electronic companies, and big
computer companies) that is DVD-CCA. In other words, you must get permission
(from your adversaries and competitors!) before you innovate. If these had
been the rules in the past, there would never have been a Betamax or an
iPod.

So this brings us back to Kaleidescape, which makes a highly-acclaimed
digital "jukebox" for DVD movies. It's expensive (~$20,000), and certainly
won't move the needle when it comes to unauthorized DVD ripping in a world
that already has plenty of free DVD ripper software. Kaleidescape played by
the rules, obtaining a DVD-CCA license to use CSS. Yet DVD-CCA sued anyway,
but lost (the judge concluded that the CSS license was so convoluted that
the "no persistent copies" requirement wasn't even part of the agreement).

Now three motion picture companies (Fox, Warner, Disney) have introduced an
amendment that would change the CSS license to put Kaleidescape out of
business. Cloaked as an amendment to permit "Managed Copies," it tells
innovators "sure, you can add a copying feature, but only if you do it our
way." But (always read the fine print), movie studios are not obligated to
"enable" Managed Copying on any of their movies. So the only sure thing that
the amendments will accomplish is to exclude Kaleidescape from the CSS
license.

And that's the lesson for today: it doesn't matter whether DRM is effective
at stopping unauthorized copying (it's not), so long as it gives the
entertainment industry the ability to veto (retroactively, in Kaleidescape's
case) disruptive innovation in the mainstream marketplace. And that's why
we're likely to be stuck with DRM on movies for some time to come, whether
or not their DRM systems (CSS, AACS, or BD+) are broken.