Rip Digital Content Legally

Kaleidoscope is a company that manufactures home media servers, composed out of a server, a music player and a movie player. The price tag is of around $10.000 for one of these, so one must wonder why pay such a price for a multimedia center, a very powerful one nevertheless, but still it's just a multimedia center. The server has the role of storing multimedia information such as music and movies on it, and it even rips the original disks the information came from for playback at a later time.

This feature arose a lot of suspicions from the DVD Copy Control Association, they are the ones responsible for the Content Scramble System (CSS) which was devised so that it would make copyright infringement difficult. The CSS is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme used on DVDs so that people couldn't copy copyrighted content to their computers or to prevent from multiplying illegal copies of these disks. And guess what Kaleidoscope's server did; yes, you got it, they copied the information on the hard drive.

A lawsuit soon followed, the DVD CCA intended to demonstrate that Kaleidoscope has broken the CSS license. But things didn't quite go as planned, and California Judge Leslie C. Nichols ruled in favor of Kaleidoscope after a week-long trial. Apparently, the 20 pages of CSS specifications haven't been included as a part of the license agreement, and during the trial, it was discovered that more than 100 meetings were held by a group of lawyers which processed the feedback sent by the engineers that worked on the project.

This resulted in a very long and complicated license agreement, which failed to specify key details about the CSS General Specification, and the decision taken by the judge is applicable only to commercial home media servers that store a single copy of the copyrighted disk on the computer in a "copy-protected form for personal use."