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Media Data Storage Government The Courts Your Rights Online News

DVDCCA Sues Maker of Luxury DVD Jukebox 260

Posted by timothy from the cut-off-nose-spite-face dept.
McSpew writes "The DVD Copy Control Association has decided to sue Kaleidescape for violating its CSS license. Kaleidescape's crime? They make a super-high-end (~$27k) DVD jukebox system that caches DVD movies onto a server (3.3TB of disk space). Kaleidescape says they've complied with the terms of their CSS license and they're considering countersuing. I want one, but I'm not a pro athlete, rapper or movie star, so I'll probably have to roll my own."
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DVDCCA Sues Maker of Luxury DVD Jukebox More

DVDCCA Sues Maker of Luxury DVD Jukebox

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  • Legitimate uses forbidden now? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:46PM (#11035870) Journal
    Okay, so instead of going after those evil soccer-mom pirate types, the target is going to be folks who can pay more for a server than the software itself? $27k/(3.3TB/9G) = $74 per title. That a lot of jack compared to a 300 disc Sony changer at $299.

    Note: I'm using 9G average, figuring on the odd 2 disc set balancing out the typical 7G on a disc.

    • Re:Legitimate uses forbidden now? (Score:4, Informative)

      by tanguyr ( 468371 ) <tanguyr+slashdot@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:49PM (#11035888) Homepage
      ...the target is going to be folks who can pay more for a server than the software itself?

      As i read the article, the target is people who violate the license agreement they signed, not their customers.
      • First, how could I possibly have time to read TFA and still get a decent spot in the posting (I was going for two first posts in two days, but wanting to make a point took too long, apparently)

        Anyway, I did scan the article, and yes, they're going after Kaleidescope. While I suppose this could be like trademark protection (defend to the death or lose it), it seems pretty silly.

        To assume that these are being used for piracy is a bit paranoid. You're talking about paying $27k for the ability to "pirate" $6
        • To assume that these are being used for piracy is a bit paranoid. You're talking about paying $27k for the ability to "pirate" $6k in software. There's no significant financial incentive to use this device for copyright infringement purposes.

          A devil's advocate moment -

          For these end users it is a convinience to use this device to "pirate" stuff, not a way to save money. People lend dvd's all the time and if you have this device you can borrow a bunch of dvds and dump them into it - not because you cannot
      • Did you actually RTFA? Kaleidescape had a license with the DVD-CCA and obviously went to considerable lengths to keep them happy. This is a well funded, high end effort. I'd be willing to bet that the DVD-CCA just changed their minds and have decided to add punitive legal expenses to the profit calculations to nullify the previously legitimate business enterprise.

        In other words the DVD-CCA probably knows they won't prevail in court but because of their deep pockets hope to win by attrition. I wasn't a grea
    • I think the thing that irks the DVDCCA is the fact that it creates a permament copy. You could theoretically rent all of those movies and not pay a penny for the content (minus the renting charge which is small).

    • Re:Legitimate uses forbidden now? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gcaseye6677 ( 694805 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:54PM (#11035941)
      This is not about piracy; it's about control. People who blow almost $30,000 on a glorified DVD player have no need to pirate the movies. This is about the movie studios keeping 100% control over how the end user uses the product they have paid for. If a company is allowed to make an expensive jukebox, then a company will be allowed to make a cheap one. Which means individuals will be able to buy them, someone might install a copy of a movie they didn't pay for, someone might figure out how to get the annoying ads off of the beginning of the movie, etc. The studios just don't get it. They fought the VCR from the beginning, and they are continuing to fight every new version of the home video recorder. Ultimately, these stupid efforts at control cost the studios a lot more than they could ever gain from it, but this is what happens when a business is run "by the numbers" with no regard for the customers.

      • Re:Legitimate uses forbidden now? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:02PM (#11036011)
        I guess the lesson to be learned is: don't get the license. Same deal with SCO, being a paying customer doesn't get you any loyalty, only legal snares to entrap you in.
        • Don't get the license, you don't have access to css disks.. which is pretty much every mainstream movie.

          No license, no product.
      • I would be more worried about...

        "The Kaleidescape Server can serve multiple movies simultaneously to Kaleidescape Movie Players throughout the home. The components interconnect over standard CAT 5 Ethernet cabling." throughout the home, or the internet

        Stick this puppy in school or something.. sheesh or better yet on the internet. Thats why they are getting sued.
        • Transmission over CAT5 doesn't necessarily imply TCP/IP-ready streaming. I suspect this is dedicated cabling running either to dedicated remotes or VGA/composite over CAT5 with baluns at the client end.

          It could be used in a multi-user houshold, but there are pretty limited cases where you would be violating typical copyright licenses. You can watch different DVDs in every room legally, you can watch the same DVD on multiple TVs simultaneously legally. The only case I can think of is playing the same titl
          • You might consider one of these instead [crutchfield.com].

            Certainly cheaper, with higher capacity storage and an RS232 port for advanced geekery. I'd love to have by-wire controls on mine rather than using the IR emitter I'm using now, but other than that these things are a lot easier to deal with.

            Plus they're SACD players as well, which is cool.

            I *have* a 2TB Snapstream server and some interfaces for moving video content around my house (either from my HTPC or from my receiver). It's nice for a lot of things. It's also a

          • It could be used in a multi-user houshold, but there are pretty limited cases where you would be violating typical copyright licenses. You can watch different DVDs in every room legally, you can watch the same DVD on multiple TVs simultaneously legally. The only case I can think of is playing the same title asyncronously in multiple locations.

            The unit does allow this. I'm watching the press-kit movie (available from http://www.kaleidescape.com/news/presskit.html#k-e xperience) and at about 7:30 into th

      • But I can't do it to my dvd's?

        No wonder the DMCA was passed and how Hollywood desperately wants to switch to DVD audio.

        Control and setting up artificial monopolies indeed.
    • Sure, a Kaleidoscape owner has paid $74/movie, but not to the MPAA. The goal of the DVD Forum/DVDCCA is that the MPAA/studios make all the money and electronics/software companies are left with crumbs.
    • the target is going to be folks who can pay more for a server than the software itself?

      No, not really . . . They are suing the guy that makes the server not the person that bought the server. . . . and I think its even a little deeper than that. The evil movie protection folks don't want the producer of a movie server setting a precendent that it's OK to make a permanent copy of the movie on another medium. . . This would open the door to other movie-server appliance type devices that might be cheaper tha

  • Multiple copies (Score:5, Funny)

    by skraps ( 650379 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:48PM (#11035880)
    DVDCCA was also tipped off that other DVD players keep extra copies of parts of the movie in something called "RAM". Also, it has been rumored that Pentium-based DVD player software keeps even more copies of the movie in something called "L1", "L2", and sometimes "L3". More lawsuits to be announced shortly.
    • Jeepers. Please, no-one tell them about graphics card memory, which keeps a pixel-perfect copy of *the entire movie* in realtime...! I still want to be able to finish Doom3.
    • "This just in: DVDCCA purchases Samsung and Plextor. Samsung and Plextor DVD drives are going to be outfitted in such a way that they won't be able to read DVD's to prevent piracy, a DVDCCA spokesperson mentioned."
    • It's amazing what you can find when you look online. There are sites that say that each and every frame of a movie is copied to the television set before playback. And if your TV is attached to a VCR, that gets a copy too. And if that copy finds it's way to the streets of New York, it's not my damned fault they killed all of the legitimate uses leaving only illegal ones.

      Don't forget the disk cache, the copy of the soundtrack on the sound card, and the copy that was just put on Kazaa because if the F*$

  • They just need a different license (Score:5, Insightful)

    by __aaitqo8496 ( 231556 ) * on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:51PM (#11035911) Journal
    The DVD Copy Control Association is just upset that they didn't think of it first.

    If they had, they could have made a seperate, more restrictive, more expensive license. :)

  • Shooting themselves in the foot? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TooMuchEspressoGuy ( 763203 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:54PM (#11035947)
    Anyone who can afford a $27k jukebox must own a heck of a lot of DVD's, most likely legitimately purchased (why would someone who can afford $27k for a "DVD jukebox" waste hours illegally downloading and burning a DVD movie, or pay for a cheap bootleg?)

    Regardless of the legality of the suit, the DCCA seems to be suing a company that caters to the most loyal DVD purchasers in the world. Such a misguided move can only have negative effects upon the DVD industry.

  • All my DVDs are "cached" too (Score:5, Interesting)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @04:59PM (#11035988) Homepage
    My media server has a ~1TB RAID5 setup, and I've copied each and every DVD I've legally purchased onto it for instant playback on our HDTV. The original DVDs go back into their cases and are stored away for safe-keeping.

    Have I exercised fair use? Definitely. Have I broken some laws? Probably. But I'm not going to give up the fair use as a result.

    And yeah, I should post this anonymously, in case the MPAA reads Slashdot comments, but dammit, we've gotta stand up!
    • Have I exercised fair use? Definitely. Have I broken some laws? Probably. But I'm not going to give up the fair use as a result.

      The term fair use is a legal term. If you have exercised fair use in your copying DVD's to your RAID, then by definition, you haven't broken any laws. However, if your copying is not a valid "fair use" per US CODE Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 107 (If you're in the USA). Then by definition, you are breaking the law.

      Thus if we are speaking about fair use and the copying of DVD's to

      • Thus if we are speaking about fair use and the copying of DVD's to the RAID, it is impossible to excercise fair use and break the law at the same time . . .

        It's fair use and a violation of the DMCA at the same time. If the law contained no contradictions, the courts would have nothing to do. :-)
        • The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA are completely separate from copyright law. Thus, it is possible to violate the DMCA without infringing any copyrights, and to infringe a copyright without violating the DMCA.

          Personally, I doubt this would be a DMCA violation. Its anticircumvention provisions makes 3 things illegal: trafficing an access control circumvention device, trafficing a copy control circumvention device, and circumventing an access control. The first 2 don't apply b/c he is doing the

      • Exercising "fair use" does not make you immune from prosecution. Repeat after me: fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement.

    • As the article mentions, I wonder how MS feels about this given their vision of the "Media PC" making all your video available wherever you want to see it.

      On second thought, maybe MS likes this. More incentive for the media companies to jump on their DRM bandwagon.

    • Have I exercised fair use? Definitely.

      Sigh. Do you actually know what fair use is [cornell.edu]? It's a defense to copyright infringement. It's (at least) a four element test. It's judicially applied on a case-by-case basis. What you're describing almost certainly ain't it.

      It's a legal term of art with a specific meaning. You'd (royal "you") would be clawing my eyes out if I was talking about my "internet" made up of IPX workstations running Novell NetWare 3.

      While I'm sure you want to believe that any use y

  • With this type of goofy draconian suing going on and the supposed implementation of anti-copying hardware going into production on DVD drives for PCs, how much longer can we expect to have equipment available to consumers that will allow us to roll our own without either

    • having tons of EE/CE knowledge
    • being able to afford doing so comparetively cheaply
    • or having some doofus suit-happy corporation suing our A** off?

  • Exact Copy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:02PM (#11036014)
    The info on their Web site seems to imply that they make an exact copy of the DVD, probably as a disk image. This seems to me that they are missing out on one of the most important benefits associated with ripping a DVD. Can this system skip, the un-skippable commercials that are starting to be added to DVDs? Can it bypass the menus and be configured to just play the movie when you select it, without having to guess what button will play the bloody thing? Has anyone used one of these?

    • Re:Exact Copy? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jdepew ( 192259 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:17PM (#11036187) Homepage
      From Kaliedescape
      Kaliededscape Server [kaleidescape.com]


      Because the Kaleidescape Server stores the movies on fast disk drive technology, it virtually eliminates all of the overhead and waiting that is commonplace when playing a standard DVD: no loading of physical media, no waiting for the DVD menu to appear, and no confusing options to select; the movie just starts.


      Been drooling over one of these since they were announced... pity that our liticious society no is treading on fair use AFTER issuing a license to do exactly what they're suing over.

      jdepew
    • If they are storing an exact copy on the raid array, then the images are still encrypted and require decrypting during playback. Probably also means that they don't skip unskkipable stuff as well.

    • Re:Exact Copy? (Score:3, Informative)

      by sploo22 ( 748838 )
      Can this system skip, the un-skippable commercials that are starting to be added to DVDs?

      They've had these commercials for a long time - my DVD player shows the icon indicating "operation prohibited by disk" when I try to fast-forward. The solution? Fire up Xine/MPlayer/VLC, and just open DVD title 1. That's almost always the very beginning of the opening credits.

  • You're not alone (Score:5, Funny)

    by Poilobo ( 535231 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:04PM (#11036041) Homepage
    "I want one, but I'm not a pro athlete, rapper or movie star, so I'll probably have to roll my own"

    Dude! I think they roll their own too:

    Ricky Williams [mpp.org]
    Snoop Dog [usatoday.com]
    Woody Harrelson [mapinc.org]
    • OK, this is a bit of a generalisation, but how is it that the people with the money tend to be college drop out-types. Even Bill Gates who is/was the richest guy in the world dropped out. What do they do to our brains in there?

      • Re:All college drop-outs, and Bill too (Score:4, Interesting)

        by corbettw ( 214229 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @06:58PM (#11036988) Journal
        Here's a partial list of famous (and rich) college dropouts.

        Computers:
        Bill Gates (Microsoft) dropped out of Harvard, 1976
        Steve Jobs (Apple, NeXT, Pixar) left Reed College in Portland, Oregon, after 1 semester
        Steve Wozniak (with Jobs, founded Apple Computer)
        Lawrence Ellison (Oracle Computer)
        Michael Dell (Dell Computer) dropped out of the University of Texas

        Other Business:
        David Geffen (Geffen Records, Dreamworks SKG) flunked out of University of Texas, Austin, AND Brooklyn College, NY
        H Wayne Huizenga (Blockbuster Video millionaire, owner of Miami Dolphins, Florida Panthers and Florida Marlins) attended Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for 3 semesters
        Ted Turner (media mogul) -kicked out, I hear!
        Ron Popeil (tv huckster, RONCO)
        William Hanna (Hanna-Barbera)

        To see the complete list, go to http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/7734/cdoaa.ht ml. Well, it's not complete, in that not everyone who ever dropped out of college is on there, but you'll be surprised by who is!

  • from the Kaleidescape FAQ (Score:5, Informative)

    by amuck ( 529908 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:05PM (#11036047)
    Q: Does loading a DVD into the Kaleidescape Server bypass DVD copy protection?

    A: Most DVDs are protected by the Content Scramble System ("CSS"), a method used to encrypt the video and audio data. Manufacturers of legitimate DVD playback products must obtain a license from the DVD Copy Control Association (the "DVD CCA") to remove CSS encryption. Kaleidescape has obtained such a license, and Kaleidescape scrupulously adheres to its required procedures and restrictions. For example, when playing back DVD content, the System only allows the audio and video outputs permitted by the CSS License Agreement. The System's analog video outputs are further protected by certain Macrovision technology, which was obtained pursuant to a separate license from Macrovision Corporation. The CSS License Agreement does not prohibit the copying of CSS-protected DVD data into memory or onto a hard disk. However, in order to comply with the CSS License Agreement, any such copying must be done without exposing certain types of DVD data (keys or unscrambled audio/video data) on "user-accessible buses," such as the PCI bus in a personal computer. The Kaleidescape System complies with this restriction by virtue of being a closed system comprised of proprietary hardware and software that Kaleidescape designed from the ground up with content security as a major design objective.
    Return to Top

    Q: Can I share movies loaded on my Kaleidescape System with other users or other homes?

    A: The Kaleidescape System is designed and licensed solely for use in a single-family dwelling. Kaleidescape's security architecture prevents movies from being accessed or transmitted over the Internet, or to computers inside or outside of the home. The movies on a Server are only accessible to Kaleidescape Movie Players that are attached to the same Ethernet LAN.
    • I must wonder, what is the movie industry thinking with this lawsuit. This device is their friend. Anybody with $27K to blow on a device is going to be buying legit anyway (except perhaps when it can't be bought at any price, but that's their fault there) and having such a device will induce them to buy even more DVDs.

      The company has taken big steps to make copying hard and they appear to be in compliance with the license.

      Suing them is going to both directly reduce sales, piss off a lot of hollywood peopl

  • $27,000 for a 3.3TB system?? (Score:5, Informative)

    by doormat ( 63648 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:05PM (#11036053) Homepage Journal
    The hardware for such a system is only $6,000 or so at the most for a real head-end unit, and maybe $750 for each client unit. If you roll your own using DVD ripping software and something like MyHTPC (and a daemon tools plugin to mount the DVD images), its free in terms of software....

    Hardware breakdown
    Server:
    Case and dual power supplies ($500)
    Mobo + Processor + RAM ($600)
    DVD Drive ($50)
    3Ware RAID-5 12-port card ($800)
    12 400GB Seagate SATA Drives ($3600) (10 data, 1 parity, 1 hot spare) for 4TB.
    Total: $5550 + SH + Taxes

    Client:
    Shuttle SFF box ($300)
    CPU, RAM ($300)
    40GB HD ($70)
    DVD Drive ($50)
    RF or IR keyboard/mouse ($70)
    Total: $790 for each client

    So I'm thinking the DVDCCA license is REALLY expensive if they charge $27,000 per unit.
    • Basic thought on business

      You lose money on 25% of your customers, because they buy the lowend stuff you offer just to get people to buy your stuff.

      You break even on 50% of your customers who buy your middleware.

      You make your money on the 25% of your customers who buy the expensive stuff.

      It' $27,000 because they: (a) can get $27,000 for them, (b) are recouping R&D costs, manufacturing set up costs, etc (c) also want to make a profit.

      An example is that IBM used to make a huge LCD that they sold for $

  • I do too (Score:5, Funny)

    by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:07PM (#11036071) Homepage
    I want one, but I'm not a pro athlete, rapper or movie star, so I'll probably have to roll my own.

    Just make sure you don't get too exotic with chemical-dipping or cross-breeding of the commoddity product. I've heard that the formeldahyde can do nasty stuff to the safety factor and cross-pollination can introduce impurities in the final product. And try not to use bleached papers too because the chemicals released could cause damage.

  • At $27,000 at 500 DVD, that $54 dollars a disc. Since $54 per disc is about three times the cost of the DVD, I'm not sure of the advantage.

    It's certainly not to save the disc by avoiding using it, because at $54 per disc it'd be cheaper to simply buy a second copy and not open it.

    Are we simply that lazy that it's worth paying three times the cost of the disc rather than to get up and stick it in yourself?

    • Its for people spending 30K for watching movies...
      Those kind of people dont want to bother copying 100s of titles, or searching around for just THAT movie that has to be somewhere....
      People who look at the price dont buy a 27K Dvd-player. No matter what features....
      • Yeah, it would definitely be a better organizational tool than having 500 discs laying around. And the living room would look cleaner as it wouldn't need shelf space to store all those discs.

        I wish I had enough money where I could spend nearly a years salary just to get rid of a shelf!

    • At that price level, we are talking people with tons of disposable income. They may alrady have $50k-$100k AV rooms. It's just a nice, convenient toy that lets them easily keep all their movies in one spot and get at them easily.

      Could you DIY for less? Of course, that's not the target market.

  • A quote to note (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MunchMunch ( 670504 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:23PM (#11036245) Homepage
    "Kaleidescape creates expensive consumer electronics networks that upload the full contents of as many as 500 DVDs to a home server, and allow the owner to browse through the movies without later using the DVDs themselves. That's exactly what the copy-protection technology on DVDs, called Content Scramble System (CSS) was meant to prevent, the Hollywood-backed group said."

    I had to read that a couple times just to make sure that I was seeing what I was seeing. The CSS system was explicitly made to prevent people from exercising fair use backups of their legally purchased DVDs? I thought it was to prevent piracy? Moreover, after paying all those congressmen all that money, they just turn a cold shoulder to their darling, the DMCA.

    Kinda seems lazy on their part. At least they could properly cite the corrupt, consumer-hostile law they explicitly created to castrate fair use.

    • That's exactly what the copy-protection technology on DVDs, called Content Scramble System (CSS) was meant to prevent, the Hollywood-backed group said.

      No it's not. Unless their cryptographers had their heads up their asses, CSS was designed to enforce the purchase of playback keys from the DVDCCA and limit who could make DVD players. The CSS algorithm does nothing to address bit-copies.

      Is the DVDCCA claiming it's inept? It sure sounds like it, and the studios may be interested in that little tidbit.

    • Re:A quote to note (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zapfie ( 560589 )
      CSS was meant to prevent unauthorized players from being manufactured and sold, not to prevent piracy. CSS never even comes into play if you are trying to pirate a DVD, as you just need to make a bit for bit copy, and the player you play them on will descramble it for you. DVD piracy hurts them, but not getting any royalties from manufacturers of millions upon millions of DVD players as the years go on.. that hurts a lot more.
      • But to make a bit for bit copy, you'd need DVD pressing equipment. You can't burn a CSS DVD since the space with the movie keys is preburned on DVD-Rs.

  • Easiest Target... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by al701 ( 617447 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:26PM (#11036274)
    So if you are a poor individual you get sued directly, but if you are rich and can afford $27k systems, then the company that is struggleing to get a product to market gets sued? Well you can't blame them for being smart about the targets.

  • Seen these and they are a joke (Score:5, Informative)

    by drgath159 ( 821707 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @05:45PM (#11036409)
    Last month at a home electronics expo in Long Beach and there was a Kaliedescape manufacturer's training session for this DVD-jukebox. I've always been interested in HTPCs so this was a no-brainer to see this thing in action.

    These units are pretty damn cool. I say units plural because you need three components. 1) Ripper 2) Storage/Server 3) Player

    They all look really sleek, black cases with blue lighting. So as the SoCal sales rep was demo'ing the units, I was a bit confused why they seperated the ripper and server, the rep responded with "Many of our clients would prefer to have a slimmer component in their library or den and the server can be in the basement." What? The server is the size of a rackmount case and the ripper is a little bit smaller. Why not save some money and combine them? I asked how much the units cost and for a 1 room set up with 1.5 TB storage was around $27,000. A few people started laughing, and a few others just got up and walked out.

    Why so expensive? Well for starters they include something like 50 DVDs already preloaded, which of course you are already paying for, but have no choice in what is preloaded other than 2-3 different packages. You can't buy the unit without the pre-loads. Also, the company decided to design the OS from scratch! Linux would be perfect for something like this, but nope, they said they've spent years developing a proprietary OS specifically for this unit. Stupid decision.

    While demo'ing the unit, the rep had a difficult time browsing around, like he'd never used one before! There were also some noticable bugs in the GUI too that one of the company engineers had a difficult time working around. We sometimes sat there for 5-10 minutes while they sorted out these issues. It was really unbelievable that they were charging this insane amount for a unit I could build for around $1,000. I'm in IT sales and this guy was a prety bad salesman so I was shocked that they put him in charge of what should be the territory that has 90% of their sales, Southern California.

    In speaking with many other companies showing off their latest media centers, PVRs, etc..., I saw some pretty impressive ones well priced too. Speaking with their reps, Kaliedescape was apparently the joke of the expo. They loved laughing and joking about that company.

    Bottom line is it was a cool unit, but waaay over-priced as other have noted before me. What makes it even worse is the reps at the expo included their main sales reps and some engineers, who were trying to sell us to be dealers, were brutal. So I'm not sure what that says about the company as a whole, but it is probably not a good thing. I don't see any way this company survives unless they get a ton of athletes/movie stars buying them left and right. At this point, they've apparently only sold a few dozen and its been on the market for I believe about a year. He seemed rather proud of that but making probably $5,000 per system, that isn't going to cut it to support an entire company.

    To answer a question I saw earlier about what's stopping the user from renting blockbuster movies to be ripped and returned. Nothing is stopping them. I asked that same question and the rep snobbishly laughed and explained that their clients don't rent movies, they buy them. Which is probably true. I also asked about how this is legal for them to do, and they said it took years of getting the movie indutry's backing, but they were finally able to do it. Looks like that might not have been the case after all. Now their clients all can be sued. Probably won't happen, but with the MPAA, you never know.

    I'm an avid anti-*AA person (DVDCCA is close enough). But in this case, I really don't care. I think it's funny actually. I'll laugh if they sue this company in to bankruptcy. They're going to die off anyways, why not speed up the process.

    • Re:Seen these and they are a joke (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ian Peon ( 232360 ) <ian&epperson,com> on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @10:50PM (#11038553)
      I am the engineer you are speaking of who was helping out our SoCal sales rep during the demo that you watched. I am concerned that you are posting many factual errors about our product and our demo. To start with, our product has a sleek, white case which perhaps you were unable to see because of the lighting. We do not pre-load any content except for a few high-definition titles which we have licensed. You may be confused with the DVD Collections we offer for sale on our site. These packages are not pre-loaded - they are shipped as a collection of individual DVDs. These collections are available to users who would like to rapidly grow their collection with a minimum of shopping effort.

      While demo'ing the unit, our sales rep (Jody) was using the IR controller that I provided for him for the first time. It was a mistake on my part as he wasn't familiar with it. Additionally, I had set up the network in the room with a router that was failing. This difficult circumstance (exacerbated by the very short time we had to set up) led to a poor technology demo. If you noticed, I rebooted the router, re-acquired an IP address and the demo was functioning again. I was sitting in the back of the room for most of the demo and not a single person walked out.

      We wrote our own OS from scratch because other available OS's (such as Linux) did not meet our needs from either a technical or a legal standpoint. This is not necessarily to say that Linux would not be up to the task, but the legal requirements of the GNU may be incompatible with other licenses that we require, and it would be difficult if not impossible to comply with the DVD CCA's CSS license agreement using a general-purpose operating system. Additionally, it did not take us "years" to create our own OS.

      As the only engineer who attended EH Expo, I apologize if I came across as being "brutal". I'm passionate about this product, and sometimes that passion comes across too strong. Many others feel this passion as well, as we've sold hundreds, not just "a few dozen" units.

      Ian Epperson
      Software Engineer
      Kaleidescape, Inc.
  • So, designing my own version of this system, I've got an Apple Xserve single-proc system with two 80GB hard drives (software RAID-1 for protection of the system,) a Combo Drive and Fibre Channel controller, plus an Xserve RAID maxed out with 5.6TB of space (4TB usable after making it a RAID-50 with hot spares.) This comes to just under $17,000. A few free programs, such as DVBackup or MacTheRipper, and I have the 'backup' capability. Add an Elgato System EyeHome, and voila! (Heck, if the EyeHome could c

  • Oh Baby! (Score:2, Funny)

    by iminplaya ( 723125 )
    Keep these lawsuits coming! I mean it. We'll be back to using stone tablets in no time, and only authorized rocksmiths will be allowed to distribute them to gov't approved customers only. Plus you will be required to register your hammer and chisel with your local publisher. Purchasing any of these tools of mass infringement(TMI's) will require a thrity day cooling off period. Anything that helps the general population understand the folly(tragedy really) of copyright can only help get this kind of corrupti
  • This product will have millions of people buying it for $27,000.00 in order to rip off the next big movie hit that comes out on a $15.00 DVD!

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