One company that could be hard hit by the decision is Kaleidescape who are currently waiting on an appeal over the copying of DVD content to a content server. Other companies set to be affected by the decision are AMX, Crestron, Escient and Control4.
In issuing the injunction, the court concluded that RealNetworks would most likely lose a lawsuit lodged late last year by the movie industry, which alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the terms of the Content Scramble System (CSS) license signed by Real.
The preliminary injunction also signifies the judge's belief that Hollywood would suffer "irreparable harm" if RealDVD software went on the market again.
Real's $29.99 RealDVD software copied movie DVDs to a PC's hard drive for storage and playback. Up to four additional PCs could be registered with Real at a cost of $19.99 each to play copies saved to an external USB hard drive. The company also planned to use similar DVD-copying software in a set-top movie jukebox that would copy DVDs and store them for quick selection and playback.
The ruling would likely apply to other brands of PC software that rip DVDs and allow for their transfer to residential video servers that lack embedded DVD-copying capabilities.
TWICE Magazine wrote that the judge, Marilyn Patel was unequivocal in stating that, products that copy DVD content to a hard drive, including their encryption, violate the DMCA and CSS license stipulations because they remove other CSS copy-control technologies. Those technologies are needed to implement the license agreement's requirements for drive locking [locking a DVD drive after insertion of a protected disc until a player authenticates the disc], authentication, and bus encryption. Those protections are lost when a hard-drive-stored copy is played back, the judge said.
