Circuit City Ripping DVDs for Users 467
Grooves writes "Circuit City is offering a DVD transfer service that's sure to enrage the MPAA. For $10 for 1 DVD or $30 for 5, Circuit City will violate the DMCA and
rip commercial DVDs for users to put on their mobile players. From the article: 'This should be a viable market. Software and services are losing out to draconian digital rights management philosophies and anti-consumer technologies aimed at increasing revenues stemming from double-dipping--what I call the industry's penchant for charging twice for the same thing.' They note that fair use
backups of DVDs have not been tested in court because all of the attention is focused on the circumvention software itself." Update: 08/04 22:40 GMT by Z : Acererak writes "Red Herring reports that Circuit City isn't offering any DVD-to-DVD copying scheme. The Slashdotted sign was an isolated screwup."
countdown (Score:4, Insightful)
That is, unless Circuit City is giving a cut of the money to the MPAA. Thankfully Circuit City has deep pockets and good lawyers, it should be interesting to see the MPAA go up against them instead of picking on little kids.
Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:4, Insightful)
You go guys. Kudos to Circuit City. (Score:4, Insightful)
WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
violate the DMCA? In what way? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since Circuit City has the software and tools to do the copy and would presumably not be handing them out to customers the standard "providing tools to circumvent copyright" issue wouldn't apply. Since backups for play on another device are fair use and legal I don't see the issue.
Obviously, since companies don't like getting sued into non-existence I suspect Circuit City feels they are on sold legal ground as well.
Re:good to see.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Reversal of Fortune (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame that only Circuit City is challenging the MPAA. Their offering is commercially viable. But I don't think Circuit City has the financial wherewithall to take this to its conclusion.
I would love it if some large corporations would gang up against the MPAA and RIAA. Power without challenge is a dangerous thing -- evidenced by DRM, and the litigious nature of these two agencies.
Many years ago Circuit City bravely (but foolishly) pursued the DivX versus DVD issue (the betamax vs. VHS of its time). That battle, which, if it had gone Circuit City's way, would have hurt the consumer. It's ironic now, because DivX was a kind of DRM back then. You bought a movie at a lower price but had to renew via a special player that connected to a site over a phoneline to renew your ability to watch that movie. Or, you could spend more and get "unlimited viewing" -- assuming, of course, the movie studio even offered it. From the initial releases there were only a handful of movies that could be had for "unlimited viewing."
There was a grass-roots effort to thwart this nonsense (DRM over the phone) and DVD as we know it now won the battle; only to be replaced by another DRM years later. A much more pervasive and restrictive DRM. The irony of Circuit City's current stand is thick.
This time, however, I'd back 'em up... Is someone up to the cause? Does the grass even have roots anymore? In spite of all of the podders out there, I don't think most of them have the mental fortitude to stand against the MPAA/RIAA. Are they even aware?
(objectively speaking: this could be a bad idea because you can bring in any number of iPods and copy a single movie to each of them. This, I believe, it's ethically reprehensible; it's also a major flaw behind this service.)
They could make a fortune doing this... (Score:4, Insightful)
As people find more and more of their disks failing, these services could become seriously mainstream. And at 10bucks a pop, a lucrative source of cash.
Unexpected edginess (Score:2, Insightful)
Odd, this from the outfit behind DIVX... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They charge that much for running "DVD Decrypte (Score:2, Insightful)
What's in it for Circuit City? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
They must have talked to a lawyer and have A) a loophole
Fair use is not "a loophole". It's an intended part of copyright. As customers have bought a DVD, part of their fair use rights include space-shifting - moving the film from the DVD to another device. Circuit City are employed by the customer to do this on their behalf.
It's not like Circuit City are simply giving people illegal copies, they are doing something perfectly legal on behalf of the owner of that property.
Re:Reversal of Fortune (Score:5, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head. The Circuit City/DivX fiasco should be the textbook business case that we push to the public and Congress whenever the **AA's start trotting out the "piracy is killing us" line.
There is nothing like pain as a negative reinforcement, and Circuit City took it up the ass (no lube, either) directly due to the overly restrictive controls on their product. They KNOW how much it hurt business, and can point straight to the balance sheet. So I'm not surprised they are looking in the other direction.
As for pissing off the **AA's, I seem to recall that Disney was their partner in the DivX fiasco, and once things started going sour, Disney hung them out to dry. Maybe that's why Disney never learned from it - they never experiencede teh pain, and so are still in love with DRM. I can't see any love lost between Circuit City and the content producers.
Re:violate the DMCA? In what way? (Score:2, Insightful)
The DMCA is an unenforcible, ridiculous law that serves no purpose other than to make most honest Americans into lawbreakers.
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's an exaggeration. First, you can be certain any corporation the size of Circuit City already has a sizable legal department. It's unlikely this action hasn't already been vetted. To the extent there are issues, and dealing with those issues gets beyond the abilities or capabilities of their legal department to handle (an unlikely scenario), they're already set up for using outside counsel when appropriate and such costs are typically budgetted well in advance.
The big question here is, given the possible legal issues, What Was Circuit City's reasoning? The article provides no real insight on that question, and the Circuit City website offers no press releases or information on the subject. In fact the article is a scoop from another website (which, in turn contains a photograph and similar speculation), so it's anybody's guess as to what's going on and why.
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:3, Insightful)
They will likely get a Cease & Desist letter before there is a lawsuit, if CC complies with this (they almost certianly will) there probably won't be a lawsuit.
The MPAA stands to lose a decent amount of their already declining public support if they try to lay the smackdown here to stop CC from doing something that practially every joe sixpack and their senator will think is a reasonable use. If they make a big deal of this now they may have a harder time fighting the inevitble tools that will come out to copy HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
My prediction is that Circuit City will stop this practice by the middle of next week and it will be the last we hear of the issue.
Re:They charge that much for running "DVD Decrypte (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing that I thought of when I read the blurb on the main
Now wait just a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone checked with Circuit City to see if the speculation is grounded in reality?
I thought not.
Re:DMCA is irrelevant here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Circuit City has cash for the fight (Score:5, Insightful)
At its heart this is about a company profiting off of the removal of DRM and re-extending fair use to a product that really shouldn't have DRM on it (or so sayeth most slashdotters). What if this is discovered to be the next business model? Cripple things with DRM, and then for additional money they'll take them off?
Shutter...If only Circuit City were doing this for free.
I think you guys have it wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Best course of action (Score:4, Insightful)
You want a bunch of bigwig companies to gang up on the MPAA? I think this is the best way to accomplish that.
Re:Circuit City has cash for the fight (Score:4, Insightful)
Therein lies the problem. If they were doing this for free, it *might* fall under fair use. They aren't. They are making a profit. This comes down to selling a copy in adifferent format without protections, and without any royalties.
Circuit City is going to lose their asses on this one.
If they did it for free, it would be a value-added service. No royalties to be paid. Instead, they've turned it into a money-making operation with no compensation to the copyright owners.
I agree 100% that *we* should be allowed to do this, and that CC should be allowed to do it as a value-added service, but they should *not* be able to charge for it.
Re:Circuit City has cash for the fight (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't people get paid for "services"? I would agree had they been selling these copies to people walking down the street... But they way I understand it, the customer is coming in and saying "I need a copy" so, they SHOULD already OWN the product, they're just paying for the service of the backup/transfer... Right?
Re:good to see.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Best Buy not the best anymore (Score:2, Insightful)
>I hate Best Buy and their constant nagging about buying warranties.
Constant nagging? It's pretty much an industry standard for consumer product sales nowadays, not just Best Buy.
It's a profit center, and sales people are required to make the pitch. Required to make the pitch, as in, if they don't make it, they become former employees. That job sucks to begin with, and pitching warranties and credit applications forces them to do things that they hate even more, but they do it, because a job that sucks is better than not having the job, most of the time.
They ask you if you want it, so be direct and say no, I don't want it. If they ask you again, say, no, I don't want it and if you ask me again I will not buy this.
> Of course I only bought the boom box for my beach vacation, and took it back when I got home.
You hate the pitch, and they hate the renters. You deserve each other.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow.
So an artist deserves to make *nothing* from their works, eh?
Nice.
Me making a COPY of his novel is not wrong,
Sure, so long as you legally own a copy and are not *selling* the copy you made.
Re:They charge that much for running "DVD Decrypte (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the DMCA, not the DCMA. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not "Copyright Millennium". And, young man, it doesn't fit the music [userfriendly.org] as well. "It's fun to violate the D-M-C-A!"
Finally, he didn't "give all source code to Macrovision." Ignoring the grammatical ambiguity therein, he gave rights to the code, and unfortunately had not previously licensed it under a perpetual redistribution license. If he had simply GPL'd it (or CC-SA or anything), Macrovision would've had all the source code they wanted and couldn't've done a thing about it.
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Circuit City has cash for the fight (Score:3, Insightful)
We keep thinking like this, and soon we're going to start shutting down independent automobile repair garages, computer repair shops, plumbers, electricians, etc... everyone else who "makes money off of someone else's product without the [explicit] permission of the copyright (can we fit patents in here too?) holder.
Has anyone considered.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The sole evidence Ars Technica has for this service is a photograph of a flyer! There is nothing on the Circuit City Web site about the service, nor does it look like the company issued a press release touting the new service.
More probably, this "service" was devised by some store manager too ignorant of the ways of the DMCA to understand what he was offering. S/He was just looking to bring in a few more bucks (on the other side of the same display case is another advert on a free in-house PC clinic. I bet that's not a Circuit City wide service either, just a local store initiative). I'm sure DVD ripping service will be discontinued as the minute corporate headquarters gets wind of this. Which, thanks to Slashdot, should be right about
I wouldn't blame the ill-informed Circuit City Manager, nor even Consumerist, which first posted the photo (but wouldn't provide a location interestingly enough). Ars Technica should know better though. That's just sloppy journalism.
joab
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:4, Insightful)
This would be like paying the neighbor kid to set your VCR to record, or rip your CDs to your computer. Except the neighbor kid works at Circuit City.
If it's legal for me to do something, why would it be illegal for me to pay someone to do something for me?
Re:violate the DMCA? In what way? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who says they're doing it digitally? Maybe they've just connected a DVD player to a video capture card. No circumvention, because the DVD player is licensed by the DVD-CCA. No infringement, because format-shifting is protected by fair use. A small loss in quality, but if you're watching it on an iPod will you really notice the difference?
Re:Why isn't CleanFlicks allowed to do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright law is fairly vague, particularly in relation to fair use. It's difficult to look at something like CleanFlicks and say "this action right here, this is what was illegal" within the scope of their entire business practices. It was the whole procedure that was found to be infringing. If they had done the editing without reproduction (e.g. VHS splices, or the timecode based systems now in use) they probably would have been okay. But the combination of things they were doing precluded a fair use defense, and thus they lost.
Anyway, I agree with your ultimate point: Circuit City isn't going to have nearly the problem with copyright law as they're going to have with the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Frankly if they do end up in court, I think this could end up being a much more significant and interesting case than CleanFlicks was. On the scale of "bad laws," the DMCA is orders of magnitude worse than copyright law even in its current state, since it has no exemption for fair use. In the CleanFlicks case I could at least see the situation from the perspective of the studios or a copyright holder who didn't want edits being made to their stuff, but I don't think that they have any such right to dictate the format in which a viewer watches the Work. Except wherein the format it's watched in has a real impact on the artistic merits of the movie, and where the prohibition is enforced against (say) all portable players because it was designed to only be seen in IMAX theaters, that's not something that a rightsholder should be able to claim control over.
I think we're only starting to see the very beginning of the battles over the DMCA: the number of future services that are going to run afoul of it are just mind boggling; ultimately I think the consumer demand for these services is going to be so great, that if the law is not modified it's just going to be flouted by the public, leading to some Prohibition-like state where the law is so disconnected from reality that it's bordering on irrelevance.
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your analogy is flawed. Nobody is preventing you from making your own movie, paying for the videotape, the equipment, and the labor. If you can produce a better product than Hollywood for less, good for you. By your logic, however, you could buy a master print from the first movie theater to release the cool movie of the moment and undersell the distributor. The creators of the movie get nothing, and you make pure profit for doing nothing. I'm sure you'd like that a lot, but honestly, how long do you think that would last before movies stopped getting made?
Incidentally, the same logic works for patents. It's nice that we have all this wonderful medical equipment and drugs to keep you alive, but who will pay the researchers if somebody else can easily come along and trivially steal the knowledge that was accumulated through substantial financial investments?
Re:Best Buy not the best anymore (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree Newegg rules, but sometimes you need something right away, which is why I specifically pointed out in my original post that CC is my choice for the stuff I don't buy online.
To expand on that, I probably enjoy more choice than the average person, I have a Circuit City, a Best Buy, a CompUSA and a Frys all less than 2 miles from my hourse and all within a half mile of each other (there used to be a Good Guys too before they bit the dust). Circuit City is definitely my best choice for local needs.
Re:Circuit City has cash for the fight (Score:4, Insightful)
repair.
Not transform. And while you are talking *physical* property one actually owns, we're talking about *intellectual* property you've only purchased the right to personal use.
Re:They could make a fortune doing this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't it remarkable how it flips back and forth between a "license" and "a disc with media on it" depending on which one sticks it to consumers more?
Re:countdown (Score:3, Insightful)
The MPAA have alreay had their money out of this deal. The consumer in question has already paid for their DVD and it's licence to use the content, so all CC are doing is taking the effort out of the consumer's choice to exercise their right to fair use of their legally licenced content. Of course the MPAA don't see this.
This service is almost identical in nature to the services where you cn ship off a box of your CDs and get them sent back to you all ripped as MP3s to a DVD.
Re:countdown (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:countdown (Score:4, Insightful)
The consumer by and large should be able to fully appreciate the benefits of being able to copy material for their own personal and private use, and so one might argue that Circuit City is only doing for the customer what the customer could do for himself.
If Circuit City was not charging for that service, that argument might hold some water. But they are, making this a commercial endeavor. Show me where any sort of commercial activity is permitted in the "Fair Use" exemptions to copyright infringement.
Re:countdown (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:countdown (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:countdown (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:countdown (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Benefit Analysis Is Flawed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because it has "always" been like this doesn't make it right. In the absense of copyright law the movie producers would need to get paid up front like everyone else on the planet. Before modern copyright laws wealthy aristocrats would commission work, I don't see why something like that couldn't work now. With the power of modern communications it would be fairly easy to do a distributed setup as well. The point being, it is not our respionsibility to hand these people a business model, the free market is supposed to work that out remember...
It's just a store or mabe a district (Score:3, Insightful)