RealDVD vs. MPAA: whoever wins, we lose

The battles in the digital video market make the wrangling in the music market look downright tame. You may have seen elsewhere that Real announced Windows-only software that can—in their estimation—legally rip DVDs to your hard drive. We covered a similar program, Drive-in last year.

These programs’ claim to legitimacy is that, unlike similar software like Mac the Ripper and Handbrake, they don’t circumvent the CSS encryption on the discs. Rather they make a bit-by-bit copy (encryption included), and they license DVD playback technology so that they essentially become a DVD player that can play back disc images on the hard drive. Furthermore, they each lock the ripped DVDs with more copy-protection to prevent users from sharing them with their friends.

Real figured it wouldn’t be long before the MPAA was knocking down their doors anyway, so they decided to take the preemptive step of suing the movie studios. Undeterred, the studios went ahead and sued them right back.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on here.

Neither of these suits are particularly good for consumers. The MPAA’s concern is that people will rent and rip DVDs instead of buying them—the age-old argument that somehow all human beings are inherently thieves, barely constrained by social mores. However, the outcome if Real wins is not really less dire, since it has the possibility of establishing precedent that ripping is okay as long as you keep DRM intact.

The real issue here, however, is that Fair Use ought to allow you to make a copy of your DVDs for your own personal use, without being branded a criminal under the DMCA. If Real wins, it sidesteps the issue of the DMCA entirely, and possibly just gives more ammunition to the studios to try and eliminate programs that break CSS encryption. Good for Real, bad for consumers who want to do things any other way.

In my editorial on the Apple TV the other day, at least one commenter raised a point that I didn’t mention: unlike with music, there is no cut-and-dried legal way to get video onto your computer. That prevents consumers from bringing their existing media into the equation, which would help tip the balance for video devices like the Apple TV. Apple’s tried to come up with a couple clever ways to get around this problem, the best of which was the idea of having studios put iPod-ready videos, already encoded with FairPlay, on their DVDs. Unfortunately, that really required the full cooperation of the studios, which, as you should realize by now, means that it was hobbled before it got out of the gate.

Look, here’s the thing: if the motion picture industry is going to block consumers from legally copying DVDs, they better have a better plan to roll out. Because consumers are dissatisfied with what’s available now, and if there’s nothing better, they’re going to keep using the easily available ripping tools that are out there. Not because they want to steal the content, but because the industry won’t give them that content the way they want to consume it.

The music industry learned this lesson the hard way—and even with the benefit of that warning, the music industry is blindly following in their footsteps. All these lawsuits and attempts to stop the inevitable are echoes of the music industry trying to shut down peer-to-peer file sharing in the late ’90s, early 2000s. So when the whole house of cards comes crashing down around them, the studios will have nobody to blame but themselves.