A judge has finally ordered RealNetworks to put its DVD ripping service, RealDVD, to sleep because apparently it’s “illegal to bypass the copyright protections built into DVDs designed to protect movies against theft”. Whoops. As part of its legal loss against the Motion Picture Association of America, the media delivery company will be forced to shell out $US4.5 million for legal costs.
While this whole thing is a bit painful for RealNetworks, will anyone actually miss RealDVD when there are plenty of free DVD-ripping solutions? [All Things D]
Shane
Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 12:27 PMWhile I can’t disagree with the ruling, the fact that the studios are still pursuing security on a product that has so successfully been broken doesn’t make sense.
While I believe they have a right to product their investment, this is going beyond sanity. Rather then investing in security mechanisms that are so easily and readily broken, why not focus on providing digital copies of the content on the disk itself (no, I don’t mean download it with a nice key, I mean, put it on the disk), then I wouldn’t have an immediate need to rip the disk.
While I’m sure some studio exec’s have just had an heart attack over the idea, I’d be happy to have me digital copies “watermarked” in some fashion (requiring me to some how register the content before it will play).
This would at least reducing the amount of “legitimate” ripping that is occurring, save me the time and expense of having to do it myself and remove at least one argument used for ripping the disks anyway…