Right around the time the world’s financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, released RealDVD. It was a short-lived piece of software that made making DVD movie backups fairly painless—too painless for Hollywood, which immediately took RealNetworks to court, claiming all sorts of copyright infringement hokum. That’s all in the past now, for RealNetworks has settled with the six “major” Hollywood studios to the sum of $4.5 million. Ouch.

The deal sees RealNetworks, yes, cough up $4.5 million for “costs and fees in connection with the litigation.” Some deal: you bring someone else to court, then make them pay all your bills. RealNetworks will also stop supporting RealDVD, and is in the process of refunding the purchase price to the 2,700 people who bought the thing.

The company’s statement is sad:

We are pleased to put this litigation behind us. This is another step toward fulfilling our commitment to simplify our company and focus on our core businesses. Until this dispute, Real had always enjoyed a productive working relationship with Hollywood. With this litigation resolved, I hope that in the future we can find mutually beneficial ways to use Real technology to bring Hollywood’s great work to consumers.

“Core business”? Hasn’t Flash (and hopefully HTML5) made RealVideo irrelevant?

I liked RealDVD, if only because it demonstrated quite clearly that Hollywood has no intention of letting you use the items you buy for your own ends. DVDs copied using RealDVD could only be played on that computer where it was ripped. It’s not like I could have borrowed Doug’s copy of Movie, then shared the resulting file with the other guys or anything.

The point is, RealDVD is now dead as disco, but RealNetworks may have earned itself a little bit of geek cred in trying to stand up to big, bad Hollywood.

Yesterday, August 11, wasn’t just Joe Rogan’s birthday. Nope, it was also the date when a judge in San Francisco ruled that RealDVD was illegal, and reiterated that it was illegal to manufacture or traffic software that makes it possible to copy DVDs. So, every time you fire up DVD Copier on your PC, make a copy of a DVD that you bought, well, you’re breaking the law. The DMCA just keeps on giving, doesn’t it?

Who can forget RealDVD? For a split second last fall, Real, a company generally loathed online as a result of its rubbish software history, found support on so many message boards for releasing RealDVD. It enabled people to make copies of DVDs to their PC. Fair Use, etc. The resulting copy was only playable on that particular PC, so it wasn’t like you’d be able to load up the ISO into your BearShare shared folder. (Man, who else remembers the days when you had to manually add servers to the various Windows Gnutella programs?) In any event, you won’t be able to do that now, since the judge ruled that RealDVD conflicts with the DMCA, the awesome Federal law that has been ruining our lives since 1998.

(Incidentally, if I were entertaining the idea of going to law school, what’s one with a fine copyright law/IP department? That’s the only type of law that would personally interest me.)

But here’s where it gets interesting. Said U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel:

So while it may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual’s computer, a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.

Soooo, we have the right to make Fair Use copies of our DVDs, but the DMCA makes it illegal for someone to produce such software. And I’m going to assume that the word “manufacture” means it’s also illegal to sit there and program your own copying software. Something to do with Federal Law (DMCA) trumping Common Law (Fair Use).

Meanwhile, I just watched this video again, by Carl Sagan, and realized that none of this matters in the grand scheme of things.

What’s another phrase for, “meh, who cares?” That’s what I’m thinking when I read that the MPAA tried to argue in court that making a personal copy of a DVD is illegal under the DMCA. Is it shocking to people that the MPAA would argue in favor of its own interests, possibly at the expense of the your ability to make rip a DVD? No. No it’s not.

This all “went down” at the Real DVD court hearing. Remember Real DVD? It is (was?) a piece of software that made copies of DVDs that would then only play within Real’s software; you couldn’t, say, burn a disc then play it on your stand-alone Sony or Samsung (or whatever) DVD or Blu-ray player. That wasn’t good enough for the MPAA, you’ll recall.

But back to the issue at hand—the MPAA hates each and every one of you.

Isn’t it strange that Real, a company so teased and mocked by the Internet community for years now (see: buffering jokes, etc.), is now in a position to argue for our rights as consumers to copy our legally purchased DVDs.

Photo: Flickr

Remember RealDVD, Real Networks’ attempt to legitimize DVD copying, only the movie studios freaked out because they didn’t understand what the software was all about? Well, Real still thinks it has a good chance of winning the lawsuit it faces. Lawsuit out of the way, it’ll go on selling RealDVD like nothing ever happened.

Should Real win the lawsuit—it’s prepared to alter the software in order to placate the judge and/or MPAA—it will resume sales, which have been frozen since October.

You will recall that Real thinks it should be allowed to sell RealDVD because it doesn’t destroy a DVD’s CSS encryption. The studios don’t give a hoot; all they see is, “Oh man, J6P will be able to copy DVDs now.” Hence lawsuit, freaking, etc. It’s very tiring, really.

No, this story has nothing to do with Homer; it just makes me laugh.

Like Achilles, it looks like RealDVD has lived a short but glorious life. Its name will echo for eternity. And so on, and so forth.

Right, so that judge that RealNetworks was so confident would rule in its favor did the exact opposite, ruling in favor of the movie studios. The temporary injunction on the sales of RealDVD will go on indefinitely; the odds of RealDVD coming back, especially before Christmastime, now look pretty gosh darn slim.

With this sentence, the judge seems to have sealed RealDVD’s fate:

I’m not satisfied that in fact this technology is not in violation of the DMCA.

That’s quite the innovative statement coming from the judge. Now all we have to do is wait for the record labels to work this line of thinking to their favor. You know, “If the judge says you can’t copy a video discs, why should you be able to copy an audio disc?”

Hooray for America.

The RealDVD saga continues, quickly becoming one of the more interesting tech stories of the past few months.

As we already know, both RealNetworks and the MPAA have been suing each other left, right and center over the past two weeks. Well now Real has issued an official statement, one sure to send shivers up the spines of the MPAA’s lawyers.

We are confident that the Court will determine that RealDVD complies with
the DVD CCA license agreement, and that it is not in violation of any
copyright laws.

From this, it does look like RealNetworks is prepared to fight this out, at least initially. Should the judge rule in the studios’ favor, who knows if RealNetworks will deem it worth all the time, money and energy to fight.

I dare ask: maybe RealNetworks created RealDVD with the knowledge that the MPAA would sue, giving it the chance to play damsel in distress. Then, we’d all feel sorry for the company, yada yada yada.

You just knew this was going to happen. Sales of RealNetworks’ RealDVD have been suspended while Real fights Hollywood in court, forever.

You already know what Hollywood’s beef is, that RealDVD allows people to illegally copy DVDs blah bah who cares. Rent, rip and retun all you want, I say.

Take this line from the MPAA’s lawsuit:

Motion pictures and television programs require substantial investments
of money, time, effort and creativity by hundreds or often thousands of
people…

Oh, please. It’s a bunch of overpaid people pretending to be other people in front of a camera, acting. No lives are saved and America’s position in the world is not enhanced. Boo hoo, Hollywood.

Today should be a happy day for Real, having just released RealDVD, the DVD-copying-for-the-masses Windows app. But now there’s lawsuits involved, and lawsuits make Baby Deity unhappy.

RealNetworks has gone to court to get a judge to declare RealDVD A-OK. This comes after some saber-rattling by several Hollywood studios, several of which threatened RealNetworks over the sale of RealDVD. Something about copyright infringement or some other nonsense. It’s pretty silly when you examine just how lightly RealNetworks treaded with RealDVD.

RealNetworks went to all this trouble to not only preserve CSS on RealDVD’d image files, but it added an additional layer of DRM to prevent RealDVD image trading.

So now we wait for the technologically ignorant court system to digest all the facts.

Those of you in the market to buy bridges for a $1, you should probably know that Real’s RealDVD is now available for download.

A quick primer on what RealDVD actually does: the $30 Windows-only program essentially makes a 1:1 copy of a DVD, with the resultant file playable only within RealDVD. (You can’t play the file in VLC, nor can you burn the file and have it play on a standard DVD player, for example.) That means if the DVD you’re copying is 7GB in size, the resultant RealDVD file will also be 7GB in size. Think of it like making a straight ISO of a disc, but one that still contains all the CSS copy protection. Real did this to appease the Hollywood studios: it can’t be seen producing a commercial application that strips out Hollywood’s precious copy protection, lest it be sued.

But RealDVD takes copy protection one step further. In addition to keeping CSS (et al.) intact, Real adds another layer of DRM onto the RealDVD file. This is done, presumably, to prevent people from sharing RealDVD images with each other. If Biggs copies 27 Dresses using RealDVD, he won’t be able to give me his RealDVD file of the film.

And if you were wondering just who RealDVD is aimed at, look no further than what BusinessWeek had to say about it a few days ago. Clearly Real is going for the crowd that uses computers as nothing more than tools to get work done; saying, “Well, Program X can copy DVDs, remove CSS, convert to h.264 and do your laundry” may well be true, but you try explaining that to the guy in a suit who thinks the term “command prompt” refers to a military maneuver.

In any event, it’s out now. Go crazy.

RealDVD hasn’t even been available for more than an hour and already Hollywood studios are upset about the ramifications it could have on the industry.

According to a statement released by RealNetworks, it has filed suit against Hollywood studios asking the court to rule that RealDVD “fully complies with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license agreement.” The suit was filed against DVD Copy Control Association, Inc., Disney, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, and Twentieth Century Fox to name a few.

In its defense, RealNetworks claims RealDVD “allows consumers to securely store, manage and play their DVDs on their computers” and “does not enable users to distribute copies of their DVDs.” It was also quick to point out that RealDVD adds another layer of DRM that locks the user to their own computer to make the program even more stringent.

“We are disappointed that the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the music industry and trying to shut down advances in technology rather than embracing changes that provide consumers with more value and flexibility for their purchases,” RealNetworks said in a statement. “For nearly 15 years RealNetworks has created innovative products that are fully legal, great for consumers, and respectful of the legitimate interests of content creators and rights holders. RealDVD follows in that tradition. We expect to successfully defend our right to make RealDVD available to consumers and consumers’ rights to use it.”

Unfortunately, it sounds like the consumer won’t win here at all. Hollywood studios claim ripping DVDs on computers is wrong and RealNetworks is claiming that it has added a new layer of DRM to lock movies down.

Yikes.

Real Networks announced that RealDVD, its latest solution allowing users to copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles because the ripped copy keeps the DRM, is now available on the company’s site.

We profiled RealDVD a few weeks ago and found that it may suit some of those who want to create a media server and don’t mind DRM, but the software’s hefty price tag of $49.99 for your first license ($29.99 as an introductory offer) and $19.99 for the additional four licenses if you want to watch the films on five computers, should be enough to shy many away. It does have a 30-day free trial so you can try it out though.

Hold onto your hats, folks, as we’re about to be inundated with more and more chatter about fair use, your rights, and whether or not Real Networks just committed the worst crime in history. It should be a real hoot.

Real will release today Real DVD, a $30 Windows application that copies commercial DVDs to your hard drive. It doesn’t merely copy the video track from the DVD, though, as Real DVD is able to tap into some sort of metadata server, adding thing like movie descriptions, posters, etc. (Sounds a lot like what Plex does when using the Library mode.)

Users will need to use Real DVD to play the copied DVD file, which is a straight 1:1 copy of the DVD image. That means file sizes greater than 4GB.

Real says it can get away with this seemingly illegal act because it respects all copyright involved. The DVDs’ CSS isn’t stripped out, and Real adds an additional layer of DRM to the copied files, ensuring that they’re only played on authorized computers. (You can play the file back on as many as five different PCs.)

Note that Real isn’t really targeting “us” with this product, but rather is going after folks who aren’t prepared to download some esoteric DVD ripper via a shady Rapidshare link, then know what to do with a Video_TS file.

The program will be released into beta today for $30, but that price jumps to $50 sometime in the future.

via Ars Technica

As anyone with a lick of tech knowledge knows, ripping a DVD onto your hard drive is, well, frowned upon by the “Powers that be” in the motion picture industry. Realizing that, RealNetworks has launched a new solution called RealDVD, which lets users copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles. Even better, it only takes about 20 minutes to do so. Sounds great, right? There’s only one catch: it keeps the DRM.

After copying the DVD onto your hard drive, you can’t transfer the movie to a friend’s computer, so you’ll be stuck using your own. Much like iTunes, though, RealDVD lets you authorize five computers to play the movies on the hard drive.

RealNetworks is quick to point out that its RealDVD solution is 100 percent legal and you won’t have any copyright lawyers breathing down your neck once you copy your first movie to the hard drive.

RealDVD sounds ideal for those who want to use their computers as a media server, but with a relatively hefty price tag of $49.99 for your first license ($29.99 as an introductory offer) and $19.99 for the additional four licenses if you want to watch the films on five computers, not everyone will be as excited to rip their movie DVDs as they are about ripping their music CDs onto a computer.