EFF has flagged a lawsuit filed by the MPAA against a small New York company called Load-N-Go Video. Load-N-Go sells both DVDs and iPods, and offers its customers a service which copies the purchased DVDs onto the iPods. Load-N-Go then ships both the pre-loaded iPod and the physical DVDs to customers.
The MPAA’s member studios have sued Load-N-Go for violating their copyrights and for violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. What’s interesting here is that the MPAA seems to be arguing than any attempt to bypass its CSS encryption technology, which is, in fact, not permitted by the DMCA, is illegal, even if Load-N-Go or consumers, for that matter, merely wish to copy content for personal uses, which is legal under the copyright law’s “fair use” doctrine.
In essence, the MPAA’s theory in this case is that if consumers purchase DVDs, they cannot copy those DVDs onto any other device, period (assuming, of course, the DVDs are encrypted). An extension of this theory is that consumers must pay an additional fee (say, via iTunes or some other outlet) if they want to watch the same movie on a mobile device.
If consumers could bypass the studios’ security technology embedded in a DVD to copy the contents onto a mobile device, say, for watching films on road trips, those consumers would be in violation of the law, the DMCA. If they purchased the same film from iTunes and downloaded the movie onto their iPods, they wouldn’t be in violation of the law.
This DMCA “loophole” seems to allow the MPAA to invoke one law in order to limit what is fairly common legal activity — the copying of copyrighted material for personal use. As EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann notes “this lawsuit is just the latest example of the entertainment industry taking aim not at ‘pirates,’ but at the legitimate fair use rights of music and movie fans.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:52 AM|Comments(0)
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