Setting the scene in DVD drama

Friday in a California courtroom, a small St. Louis software company begins a fight for its life against a phalanx of powerful Hollywood movie studios.

On one side is 321 Studios (321studios.com), maker of computer programs that allow home users to copy DVD movies they own.

On the other is the Motion Picture Association of America, which charges that 321's software circumvents copy protection schemes in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The court proceeding represents a head-on collision between the DMCA and fair use rights of consumers.

Since the DMCA's passage in 1998, copyright holders have been using one section of the act against all sorts of technological developments. Manufacturers of universal garage-door remote controls, for example, are being sued for circumventing proprietary protections inside the door opening machinery.>

And makers of replacement printer toner cartridges are being dragged to court for constructing chips that allow Lexmark printers to use their products.

"This is a waste of the courts' time," says Elizabeth Sedlock, 321 Studios chief marketing officer. "The way it's going, anyone can create an access control mechanism and sue anyone else for violating it. The entire issue needs to be revisited. It's causing a lot of problems."

In its filings, the MPAA's nine Hollywood studios, including MGM, Sony and Time Warner Entertainment, say that DVD encryption technologies must be protected in a digital age when home computers can create perfect copies of all sorts of media. Otherwise, it reasons, piracy will run rampant.

For MPAA leader Jack Valenti, the DMCA "makes very clear that anyone who makes available material which circumvents encryption of creative works violates the law.

"You can make backup copies of any VHS tape you own, but Hollywood is trying to set a line of demarcation between VHS and everything else and DVDs," says Ms. Sedlock. "It's trying to say digital media is different and should be treated differently."

The company's $100 DVD X Copy is the first product to let users copy an entire DVD movie onto a blank DVD in any computer DVD-writable drive. Since being released in November, more than 150,000 copies have been sold at outlets such as CompUSA, Circuit City and Fry's Electronics.

To deter its use as a piracy tool, 321 Studios has built its own copy protection into DVD X Copy. Code embedded into the copies made by the program will not permit copies to be made of copies.

As a further defense, a digital watermark is injected into the DVD copies. That way, they can be tracked if they appear on rogue Internet file-sharing services. The program inserts a disclaimer informing viewers that the DVD is a backup intended for the personal use of the DVD purchaser.

The developers of DVD X Copy also point out that it doesn't break the code used to protect commercially sold movie discs. Instead, the program grabs video and audio after it is decrypted by the DVD drive, which means the DMCA is never in play, 321 Studios attorneys argue.

To bolster its anti-piracy stance, 321 Studios earlier this month said it was opening a Piracy Prevention Hotline to receive any information on misuse of its products, including an older release, DVD Copy Plus, which copies DVDs to CDs. And it has offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone using its software in a commercial manner.

"But it's really not about piracy at all," she says. "This is about whether or not it is legal for consumers to make backup copies of DVDs they own. Either it is or it isn't. We say it is legal for consumers to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes."

Friday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California will be asked to decide whether 321 Studios should be enjoined from distributing its software.

But Ms. Sedlock says this may be only the first skirmish in a lengthy legal fracas.

"We are willing to take this all the way," she says. "If we don't, companies like ours are going to go out of business. And more companies will follow. This provision of the DMCA just stifles technology and stifles advancement.

"It's just all wrong."

exactly so when is it going to be repealed is what i would like to know not parts of it but the whole dmca

I've been looking into doing something to copy some of my movie DVDs for use when I travel. I see that this program copies to CVD format, using a CD-R burner. Does anyone know whether the CVD copy is equal in quality to the original, or whether there's any way to really copy a DVD in its original format? And does it copy to a single disk, or does it take two? Their web site doesn't seem to give a lot of information.

There seem to be a lot of other programs out there, some of them Freeware. I'm uncertain whether it's worth looking into any of this.

exactly so when is it going to be repealed is what i would like to know not parts of it but the whole dmca

When the lobiests run out of money or congress repents of their evil ways. Don't count on either one of these to actually happen.

I have their software and it is about as user-friendly as a brick to the head.

I'd rather smash my soft-and-dangly parts with a hammer.

All I want to do is copy a DVD onto another DVD, not to a CD. Well, there is this little problem. Most commercial DVDs are ~7 gigabytes. My DVD burner (HP 200i) burns 4.7 gig DVDs. Can you imagine the gyrations to get around this fundamental mismatch?

I can.

Sorry, my time is too valuable and I am sorry I bought the product.

--Boris

Go to http://www.dvdrhelp.com . This site has more information about the various formats and the trade-offs for using each. IIRC, VCD is about 2/3 the quality of DVD. Maybe less.

If you're using a laptop with a large hard drive, I believe a piece of software called "Alcohol 120%" will allow you to emulate the disks on your HD. You can copy the DVDs right to your drive and take them along.

As a previous poster suggested, other methods are available at the dvdrhelp.com site. It's the best source out there.

Can you imagine the gyrations to get around this fundamental mismatch?

The software does exactly what it's supposed to do. Perhaps it doesn't do what you expected it to?

You're right that most DVDs won't fit on a single disk. But some do. And a few more will fit once the software strips off the special features. If it still doesn't fit, the software splits the DVD where you want it split, and puts it on 2 disks. There's no getting around that if you want full quality. There's never been any secret that consumer discs are only 4.7GB.

If what you were looking for is a way to make 1:1 copies, that software's out there too, but you'll obviously lose some quality when the video is transcoded down to a lower bitrate. DVD2One and Pinnacle's new software follow this path, and I've read some good reviews about Pinnacle.

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