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Copying up next for DVD-CCA? - October 1, 2007

Now that the DVD Copy Control Assn. has given its final blessing to on-demand manufacturing using CSS, what's next on the licensing agency's agenda?

Judging by the group's last meeting in late September, not much. So few items were on the formal agenda that some members of the Copy Protection Advisory Committee (CPAC) board didn't even bother to attend.

But that could be changing soon.

Media Wonk hears that the next big issue to be tackled, perhaps beginning as soon as the organization's next meeting in mid-November, will be managed-copy of standard-def DVDs.

Managed-copy--which allows a consumer to rip the contents of a DVD to a DRM-protected file on a PC--was incorporated into AACS, the copy-protection system used for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The question now is whether and how to extend the same capability to standard-def DVDs.

The issue has been on and off the table several times over the past two years but was never resolved. It was originally included in an omnibus overhaul of CSS proposed by the studios in 2005 that also included on-demand manufacturing as well as a system of enhanced bus encryption for DVD software players and the incorporation of watermark detection. But the omnibus approach proved too unwieldy to achieve consensus.

In early 2006 Microsoft offered a standalone managed-copy amendment, without the enhanced bus encryption or watermark detection, but it, too, was voted down by the studios and CE companies.

Some studios, however, remained anxious to bring DVD ripping within the CSS licensing regime so the issue has never really gone away.

No specific proposal has been circulated yet, from the studios or anyone else, so it's unclear whether a new managed-copy amendment would seek also to address the enhancement the studios sought last time.

Another big question is whether any new managed-copy amendment would incorporate the "Kaleidescape amendment" that was dropped from the agenda in June after Kaliedescape threatened legal action.

That amendment was intended to negate a court ruling earlier this year that the CSS license, as currently written, does not specifically prohibit DVD players from permitting archiving and streaming of DVD content from a hard drive, as Kaleidescape's home media servers are designed to do. The ruling is on appeal, but the appeal process is expected to take 12 to 18 months.

While the threat of legal action may be enough to deter some DVD-CCA members from tackling Kaleidescape, it's not clear that you could address managed-copy without taking account of the Kaleidescape ruling.

Kaleidescape's servers rely on a kind of managed-copy now: DVDs are decrypted in a licensed DVD drive and the decrypted content is then copied to a hard drive where it is re-encrypted. That's managed-copy. And according to the court, it's already permitted by the CSS license. So what would a managed-copy amendment accomplish, other than perhaps specifying how the copy is to be encrypted?

Stay tuned. The next DVD-CCA meeting starts Nov. 19 7 in Los Angeles.

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