RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser told a San Francisco Court on Tuesday in his ongoing legal battle against the motion picture industry that his company’s RealDVD – a DVD-copying software – is not designed to create a free-for-all of illegal copying.

The software was swiftly pulled from the market by court order after the major studios (Disney, Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, NBC Universal, Warner Bros, Viacom) sued RealNetworks on 30 September 2008, just weeks after RealDVD was introduced. It filed a countersuit the same day. The DVD Copy Control Association, which licenses the CSS system, is also involved in the case.

RealDVD allows DVD owners to copy their discs on to a computer or laptop hard drive. RealNetworks insists that his $30 software kit is not a hacker's tool, because it not only maintains a DVD's copy protection technology (CSS), but adds an additional layer of digital rights management technology that, in effect, locks the copied DVD to the hard drive. As a result, users cannot copy, upload or export the DVD copy.

RealNetworks argues that the software allows consumers to carry their DVDs on a laptop while leaving the original discs behind.

As a reminder, computer users have been able to make unrestricted copies of DVDs since late 1990s when Norwegian hackers cracked the Content-Scrambling System (CSS) devised by the music industry to copy-protect DVDs and released their DeCSS software on the Internet.

Motion picture lawyers are arguing that RealNetworks had deliberately circumvented copy protection mechanisms, in particular Sony’s ARccOS (Advanced Regional Copy Control Operating Solution) and Macrovision’s RipGuard technologies in order to build RealDVD.

The trial is presided over by Judge Marilyn Patel, who was also involved in the original Napster case. In that trial, she ruled in favour of the music industry, but it remains to be seen whether the film industry will achieve the same result.

Story filed 30.04.09