“RealNetworks has agreed to pay USD 4.5 million and permanently stop selling its RealDVD software as part of a legal settlement with six Hollywood movie studios, the company said Wednesday. The lawsuits date back to 2008, when the movie studios accused RealNetworks of selling software that allowed people to essentially steal DVDs by making copies of them. RealNetworks argued that RealDVD was designed only to let customers make a backup copy of movies on their PC hard drive. But in granting a preliminary injunction against sales of the product last year, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said RealDVD violates federal law as well as a license agreement that Real had signed with the DVD Copy Control Association.”
while this may make it harder for some people to make copies of dvd’s it doesn’t make much difference, like tossing a pebble into a raging river. sure you made a ripple, but no one is going to notice (except real, who now has to pay for tossing in said pebble).
anyways, the industry is trying to stop mainstreaming something that ultimatly will be out of their control, especially in this world of digital distribution and so on.
thanks for fighting the good fight for a while their real, for that I admire you… although, adding that in with my feeling towards the real player, you really only come out breaking even. Still, even is a good (the Helix open source project at the heart of the real player isn’t that bad, it just didn’t have much of a following).
Add to that, the sort of people who would copy DVDs to distribute is the same sort of people who would have just downloaded RealDVD anyway (and will continue to do so even after the RealDVD product has shut down)
so once again all the draconian movie industry have done is bullied their legitimate customers.
Edited 2010-03-05 12:56 UTC
I hadn’t heard the name Real Networks in a long time other than in not-so-flattering flashbacks to the days of Realaudio.
It sucks for Real, but it makes no difference. Plus, I wonder how many sales they actually got? There are free programs to copy DVDs on any platform you can imagine these days and, face it, if you’re going to copy a DVD in the first place chances are you don’t give a **** about patents or the DMCA anyway.
Book publishers are coming after Xerox machines next.
Maybe Photographers will go after scanners.
Idiotic.
Not quite the right comparison, you’re comparing hardware to software. More apt would be when the video industry tried to go after VCRs, or when the music industry went after recordable tape decks. In both cases, their attempts failed miserably and I think enough of a precedent has been set for hardware-based copying. What book publishers might try to do is kill off OCR software, not bloody likely though.