3 Count: Real-ly Dead

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1: Court issues preliminary injunction in RealDVD case; solid victory for studios and DVD CCA

First off today, the movie studios have scored a major win in their fight with Real over the RealDVD product. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who is also the judge that famously shut down Napster, has issued a preliminary injunction that extends the temporary injunction barring Real from selling the product.

RealDVD is a DVD copying application that is intended to rip DVDs to a hard drive for later play back. However, DVDs are protected by an encryption known as CSS, which the DVD Copyright Control Association grants licenses for people to use to build DVD players. According to the DVD CCA and several studios, Real’s use of the CSS encryption to make RealDVD is a violation of the license they were granted and the court has agreed.

Strangely, though it deals with issues revolving around the DMCA anti-circumvention clauses, this case itself is largely a licensing dispute, with Real believing it had the right to create a product like RealDVD, where the DVD is not present at playback, but the movie studios, and the court at this point, disagree. However, this is just a preliminary injunction so the judge could reverse this at trial, however, that is unlikely and it is far more probably that Real will appeal this and try their luck elsewhere first.

2: Pirate Bay sinks under electric storm

Next up today, The Pirate Bay suffered some downtime yesterday leading to speculation that the recent BREIN court ruling in the Netherlands was the cause. However, that appears to not be the case as the site itself is active again and The Pirate Bay has released a statement blaming the outage on a power failure.

The anti-piracy group BREIN successfully sued The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands, at a trial where no representatives from The Pirate Bay were present, and won an order for the site to block access to Dutch users or face daily fines. However, BREIN has said it will not begin demanding those fines until the 27th, when the site is supposed to be sold to Global Gaming Factory.

3: Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

Finally today, for those who are interested in rational, civilized copyright debate, I highly recommend that you check out William Patry’s new blog, which he created to promote by the same name. He and former recording industry attorney, Ben Sheffner, who writes the equally great Copyrights and Campaigns blog, are having a friendly back and forth on copyright issues.

Easily one of the best debates on copyright issues as it brings together two of the “smartest men in the room” on copyright issues to argue two very different viewpoints. I can not recommend this read highly enough!

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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