A Silicon Valley start up has won its battle against a powerful
movie industry body to allow it to sell a server on the basis that it can store
DVD movies on
hard-drives.
DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) had demanded that Kaleidescape stop marketing its servers that store
movies in a hard-drive array on the basis that it infringed copyright.
Judge Leslie C. Nichols ruled against the in a civil suit saying that the basis
for his decision was his ruling that an entire section of the DVD CCA's spec for
the Content Scramble System (CSS) was not technically included as part of the
license agreement.
He said that the CSS spec, which was designed by a committee
of lawyers was confusing. He added that the 20-page document known as the CSS General
Specification was not part of an overall group of 170 pages of technical
specifications defining CSS.
This was crucial as the The DVD CCA relied on language in
the general spec to assert any system playing DVD movies has to have the
physical disk present.
Kaleidescape believed that the CSS agreement allowed the company to build a system that kept a single, protected copy of a DVD on a hard drive for private
use.
More here.