A major showdown between Hollywood moviemakers and the DVD copiers comes to court at last, when the U.S. District Court for Northern California hears arguments April 25 from a manufacturer whose software lets you copy DVD discs.
"At stake for the studios are potentially billions of dollars in revenues that would be lost if nearly perfect digital copies of movies on DVD were sold in large quantities on the black market or circulated on the Internet in digital files," said Wired.
The software maker, 321 Studios of St. Louis, claims the software protects DVD owners by letting them make backups in case their discs are lost or damaged, but the studios argue that software violates part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the part making it illegal to get around digital encryption codes, Wired said. 321, however, has insisted the DMCA lets a software owner do it when the copy isn't made for distribution.
"The first issue is what does the DMCA mean, and does it prohibit all circumvention of encryption, or does it only prohibit the circumvention when it's being done to engage in copyright infringement," 321's attorney, Daralyn Durie, told the magazine. But the studios' attorney, Russell Frackman, told the magazine 321 is "stripping my copy protection. The (DMCA) has never provided you have the right to get two-for-one."
