321 Studios faces another lawsuit in the United States

February 16, 2004

321 Studios, the developers of DVDxCopy, will face another lawsuit in the United States. The company is using technology to circumvent the DVD copy protection called CSS. This has brought them nothing but trouble as the company is now being sued by the entertainement industry of the United States, copy protection developer Macrovision and the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) has now joined them.

The DVD CCA is the inventor and developer of the CSS copy protection on a DVD. This protection makes it impossible to e.g. copy files with Windows Explorer. Users that try to do this will notice that the files are scrambled/encrypted. As the movies on DVDs are encrypted they need to be decrypted by software or DVD players.

Unfortunately the
method of decrypting this has found its way on the internet and in several
software packages such as DVDxCopy and AnyDVD . The entertainment industry will now focus on stopping the developers of this software.

The suit is the fourth set of claims to be filed against 321 Studios, which markets the most popular DVD copying software commercially available. Previously, the company has been sued in both California and in New York by coalitions of Hollywood studios and by Macrovision, another copy-protection technology company. The DVD CCA recently dropped lawsuits against individuals who posted code used in the process of copying DVDs online. After that decision, the group said it would use other tactics to defend its intellectual property.

"In taking this legal action, DVD CCA is turning its focus toward those who produce and broadly distribute products in the marketplace that facilitate the widespread infringement of the copyrights on motion pictures that CSS was designed to protect," said Steven Reiss, an attorney for the trade organisation, in a statement. "DVD CCA believes that halting the mass marketing of these illegal products is the most important and effective step toward protecting its property from theft and misuse in a changing marketplace."