The proposed amendment was made public in a letter sent by Michael
Malcolm, the chief executive of Kaleidescape, a DVD jukebox company
which successfully defeated a suit by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) this past March. The proposed amendment is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, according to Malcolm.
A spokesman for the CCA said he was not aware of the proposed amendment, but added that he could not comment until the CCA had finished its deliberations. A spokeswoman for Kaleidescape said she understood that a final decision could take weeks, if not months.
The amendment is currently being considered by the Content Protection Advisory Council (CPAC) of the DVD CCA. If enacted, it would become binding in 18 months from the date on which the CCA notified its licensees, which include DVD hardware and software manufacturers.
The terms of the amendment, formally referred to as the "Unknown Specification Amendment," are just a paragraph long, and would basically eliminate DVD copying of any form, whether for the purposes of fair use or not.
The amendment reads:
"6.4. Certain Requirements for DVD Products. DVD Products, alone or in combination with other DVD Products, shall not be designed to descramble scrambled CSS Data when the DVD Disc containing such CSS Data and associated CSS Keys is not physically present in the DVD Player or DVD Drive (as applicable), and a DVD Product shall not be designed to make or direct the making of a persistent copy of CSS Data that has been descrambled from such DVD Disc by such DVD Product."
The amendment was proposed by Chris Cookson of Warner Bros., Ben Carr of Walt Disney Studios, Jeffrey Lawrence of Intel, Gabe Beged-Dov of Hewlett-Packard, David Harshman of Toshiba, and Andy Parsons of Pioneer Electronics, according to Malcolm as well as the attached letter proposing the amendment, and signed by the legal counsel representing the signatories.
To Malcolm, the proposed amendment was designed to put Kaleidescape out of business, and represented an unfair monopoly that should be broken up. The letter was addressed to several members of the Federal Trade Commission, key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Department of Justice staffers, EU regulatory bodies, and the chief executives of the companies the amendment signatories are employed by, as well as industry executives like Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.
"The real purpose of this proposed amendment is to put Kaleidescape out of business by excluding the Kaleidescape System from the DVD playback devices authored by the CSS License Agreement," Malcolm wrote. "You should be aware before you vote on the proposed amendment that you expose yourself, your employer and the DVD CCA to serious and substantial antitrust liability if you vote for this amendment. Both state and federal laws outlaw anticompetitive conduct by businesses joining together to put a competitor out of business."
The DVD CCA has previously tried twice to add "managed copy" provisions to its licensing agreement, and both times the vote has failed, according to reports. Managed copies would either transfer the CSS key to the recordable DVD, which would require an additional CSS "replicator" license, or else use what is called "pre-keyed" media, which would include the CSS key already as part of the disc structure.
The proposed amendment would apparently add hardware restrictions to prevent DVD data from being descrambled and then copied. To date, that provision has been effectively enforced by litigation, which has effectively prevented mainstream software companies from copying or "backing up" DVD movies. A number of independent software developers, however, have published utilities or other applications for "ripping" DVD movies.
The proposed amendment would also prohibit software manufacturers to create "virtual drives," running a DVD image from a hard drive. The previous Kaleidescape case touched upon the company's use of ripping a DVD to a large internal hard drive, and playing back the movie on demand without the need for a physical disk to be inserted into the drive.
In the previous ruling settling the Kaleidescape-DVD CCA dispute, Judge Leslie C. Nichols of the Santa Clara Superior Court merely stated that the company had met its obligations to the CCA under its license agreement, without addressing the broader issue of fair use.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated at 4:20 PM PDT with comments from both the DVD CCA as well as Kaleidescape.
**BULLET's Note**
Said information was copied from:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2148802,00.asp
All their work. But, if you read the article, it's pretty messed up!!
