Tag Archive: Kaleidescape

A day after a court upheld a preliminary injunction barring sales of RealNetworks’ RealDVD DVD-copying software, a federal appeals court in Los Angeles has reversed (PDF) an earlier trail court victory by Kaleidescape that had found the company’s high-end media servers systems did not violate the CSS license agreement in copying DVDs to hard drive-based storage.

The Kaleidescape case has been wending through the courts sine 2004, and a 2007 trial court ruling had found that Kaleidescape had not violated contracts with the DVD Copy Control Association by creating high-end media servers that could copy a DVD’s contents to a hard drive-based media server. Yesterday, an appeals court overturned that ruling, finding that Kaleidescape had breached the CSS contract and acted in bad faith in creating its DVD-copying feature.

Upscale home media server maker Kaleidescape has won a narrow court victory over the DVD Copy Control Association, which had sued the company over its home theater systems’ capability to make a copy of CSS-protected DVD content for personal use on the system.

The DVD Copy Control Association had sued Kaleidescape, alleging the systems’ capability to copy DVD protected with the Content Scramble System (CSS) violated the company’s license to use CSS technology. Following a seven-day trial, Judge Leslie C. Nichols of the Santa Clara Superior Court ruled that Kaliescape was, in fact, in compliance with the CSS license and that, due to complexity and poor wording, the 20-page CSS specification was technically not part of the license agreement. The judge also noted Kaleidescape had made "good faith efforts" to comply with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license terms.