Along with the 1996 Telecom Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was one of the worst legacies of the Clinton years. Unlike the Defense of Marriage Act or the faux Welfare Reform Act, both the Telecom Act and the DMCA pretended to be forward looking bills that would usher us into a more prosperous 21st Century.

Rotten at the root, the DMCA continues to bear poison fruit. The latest is the ruling by the infotainment industrial complex' favorite judge Marylin Patel (the judge who killed Napster and inadvertantly the music industry in 2000) to ban Real DVD -- an innocuous technology that allows consumers to make personal copies of the DVDs they have purchased.

From PC World:

RealNetworks' RealDVD was handed a devastating blow yesterday as U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel realdvd copyright in a case pitting the two against each other regarding the right to copy films onto one's hard drive. She granted a preliminary injunction against sale of RealDVD, pending a trial over copyright infringement. A cluster of Hollywood honchos, including Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney filed suit against RealDVD back in September. Now RealDVD's site is a headstone: "RealDVD is Currently Unavailable."
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The argument stems from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998. Circumventing encryption technology on digital media was made illegal by the DMCA. According to Patel's decision, RealDVD broke through a DVD's Content Scramble System code in order to transfer movies onto hard drives.

But RealDVD was very stringent with its copying program. The basic package allowed for only a single digital copy to be placed on your hard drive. After paying extra licensing fees, you could transfer the digital copy onto as many as five other hard drives. Disc-based burning was never an option.

Meanwhile, programs such as the VLC Media Player flaunt the law and provide software that allows for real-time copying. So why is the MPAA hard up for RealDVD and not these other products? It seems to me that the MPAA has chosen a battle against RealDVD to set an example but is perhaps ignorant of the proliferation of DVD-ripping programs available.
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It's sad that RealDVD, with its sophisticated and lawful approach to DVD-copying, had to swallow the wrath of the MPAA. It's also clear that the DMCA needs to be updated to reflect the changes in media distribution 11 years later. It's perfectly legal to rip music from a CD and upload it onto an iPod for personal use; why can't a person do the same with their own copies of movies? The assumption is that everyone using a program such as RealDVD is a criminal bent on ripping as many Netflix movies as possible, rather than a law-abiding citizen who simply wants to watch flicks on the go. For an organization that supposedly has its finger on the pulse of moviegoers, the MPAA strikes me as horribly distrustful and curmudgeonly in its approach to modern times.

You're probably going, so what? Let's talk about health care. Not so fast.

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