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Proposed Amendment Would Ban All DVD Copying Posted by: DVDGuy, 15:53, June 25, 2007             Viewed: 948 Times Categories: DVD Movies, Legal, Consumer Rights, DRM

A new proposal will be deliberated by the DVD CCA that will ban the playback of CSS encrypted movies if the original disc is not present.

The moves comes after Kaleidescape, a company that produces home entertainment servers, won a case bought against them by the DVD CCA (Copy Control Association, responsible for DVD copy protection issues). Kaleidescape allows users to copy DVD movies onto it's hard-disk servers, complete with CSS encryption, which their CSS licensed players can then play off the hard-drives. Unlike other CSS related cases, Kaleidescape did not break CSS or attmpted to descramble it, merely copy the data as is from the disc to the hard-drive and then decrypting it using the CSS license they purchased from the DVD CCA. It is this "loophole" that the DVD CCA is trying to close off.

The amendment reads as follows:

"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."

Supporters of this amendment will argue that by allowing CSS content to be played back without the original disc, this allows people to rent or borrow discs, copy to the Kaleidescape server, and then return the original without having to purchase it outright. Kaleidescape argues that people who purchase their expensive range of equipment are unlikely to do things this way - Kaleidescape simply makes it easier for people to view and manage their movie collections.

Software such as PowerDVD also allows users to playback DVD files from the hard-drive, but this amendment should not affect software and hardware such as these, since they can only playback unencrypted DVD files, such as home recordings.

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