AllThingsD » honor system

Rent. Rip. Restraining Order.

John Paczkowski — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:38:41 +0000

The legal broadside Hollywood lobbed at RealNetworks (RNWK) last week has upset the company’s carefully prepared plans to offer a mainstream means of legally copying DVDs. A judge has issued a temporary ban on sales of Real’s RealDVD software in the wake of a lawsuit brought against it by the Motion Picture Association of America. Point your browser at the RealDVD site today and you’ll be greeted with the following message:

Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable. Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use.”

Good luck with that, folks.

As I’ve noted here before, RealDVD is a nice idea–a $30 software program that easily copies entire DVDs, right down to the menus, bonus features and cover art. And it does so in an ostensibly legal way. What it doesn’t do, though, is prohibit users from ripping DVDs that they rent. Effectively, users are on the honor system, which isn’t exactly a Hollywood-approved DRM scheme.

One–Make That Two–Words: Plastic Logic

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:00:07 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Rent. Rip. Return.

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:19:24 +0000

RealNetworks Inc. (RNWK) CEO Rob Glaser calls RealDVD, the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper, “a compelling and very responsible product that gives consumers a way to do something they have always wanted to do.” But really, what it’s giving them is a more cumbersome way of doing something that they’ve already been doing for years now with DVD Decrypter, AnyDVD, Handbrake, MacTheRipper, RipIt and the like.

Like other DVD rippers, the $30 software program easily copies entire DVDs–right down to the menus, bonus features and cover art. But unlike those rippers, RealDVD does so in an ostensibly legal way. It copies them without breaking their digital rights management schemes by installing a second layer of DRM on the ripped files that prevents users from sharing the DVDs online.

What it doesn’t do, though, is prohibit users from ripping DVDs that they rent. Effectively, users are on the honor system. And last I checked, the honor system isn’t a Hollywood-approved DRM scheme.