So far, it seems quite clear that selling any device with preloaded copyrighted games, music or movies may be against the law if not accompanied by a license or without authorisation of the copyright holders. A clear example is a shop that sold modded Xbox's with its HDD filled with preloaded games. Well TVMyPod, a tiny Massachusetts company is selling iPods that come preloaded with movies and TV programs from DVDs of the user's choice. While this may signal a legal issue, apparently the consumer must purchase the DVDs they want transferred. TVMyPod then does the transfer process, puts the iPod back in its original packaging and delivers this along with the DVDs to the consumer.
As the company currently only charges the consumer for cost of the iPod and DVDs and the consumer gets all the DVDs they paid for to have transferred to the iPod, the company claims it is legal under the fair use provisions of the US Copyright Act. Apparently, even though it is illegal to bypass the CSS encryption system on DVDs under the DMCA, the company claims their process does not involve DeCSS. Later on the company aims to allow existing iPod owners to send in their iPod to have further content to be transferred. Thanks to both Hypnosis4U2NV and mickrick for letting us know about the following news:
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Customers choose any content currently available on a DVD and which iPod they want. TVMyPod then puts the content on the player and ships the original DVDs along with the iPod restored to its original packaging. TVMyPod co-founder Vijay Raghavan said most people don't have the time or the technology to convert DVDs into the iPod's required format, which is what gave him and his business partner the idea to start the service. |
While connecting a DVD player up to a capture device does not involve breaking the CSS encryption, either the capture device would need to get around the Macrovision copy protection or the DVD player would need to be modified in some way to disable Macrovision. In either case, this still involves circumventing this copy protection which can run into problems with the DMCA.
Even if there was no copy protection to get around, the former MP3.com once had a service where a consumer could access MP3 versions of their CDs if they let a tool on MP3.com to authenticate their discs. Unfortunately, the company got into legal issues and had to withdraw the service even though they only offered MP3 version of what ever the consumer had physical versions of on CD.
Hypnosis4U2NV add the following: This is very interesting because on one end the companies have the DMCA on their side and on the other we have the Fair Use rights which allow us to make legal copies of media we legally own.. The problem that I see with this service is that despite what the co-founder Vijay Raghavan says about not decrypting the DVD's that are loaded onto the iPods, we all know that practically all DVD's shipped already contain CSS encryption and we need software (DeCSS) to decrypt the protection to allow for a successful copy.. So is it legal for the corporate suits or the consumer? Maybe both? Maybe none?
mickrick also added: An excellent venture and hopefully one that will avoid persecution from the ca$h-hungry MPAA. This is one idea I would like to see taking off big time globally.
Source: Yahoo News - Technology
