DVD Makers Say That You Don't Really Own The DVDs You Bought... Thanks To Copyright

from the ownership-sure-is-a-funny-thing dept

So, we already wrote about some of the crazy filings from John Deere and GM claiming that when you buy a vehicle from them, you don't really own it, thanks to the software inside, which those companies argue they still really own. This was part of the opposition to requests for exemption from Section 1201 of the DMCA. Once again, Section 1201 is the anti-circumvention clause, that says you can't break DRM even if it's for non-infringing purposes. But... every three years, the Librarian of Congress is allowed to "exempt" certain classes of items from Section 1201. the responses above concerned locking down automotive software, but there are some other crazy ones as well.

For example, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) and the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) are so worried about an exemption for certain kinds of DVDs that it ran to the Copyright Office to claim that you simply don't own the DVDs you buy, and they'd really appreciate it if people stopped thinking they actually bought the DVD that, you know, they bought:

When consumers buy a DVD or Blu-ray disc, they are not purchasing the motion picture itself, rather they are purchasing access to the motion picture which affords only the right to access the work according to the format’s particular specifications (i.e., through the use of a DVD player), or the Blu-ray Disc format specifications (i.e., through the use of a Blu-ray format player). Consumers are able to purchase the copy at its retail price because it is distributed on a specific medium that will play back on only a licensed player.

Notice that even this statement is self-contradictory. The first sentence says they are not purchasing any content, but merely a "right to access." And yet, the very next sentence talks about the "purchase [of] the copy." So which is it? Are people purchasing a copy of the movie? Or are they merely licensing access to the content on the plastic?

This is a problem with Section 1201, showing how its expansive nature is fundamentally changing the concept of ownership in ways many people haven't even begun to understand yet.

Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, dmca 1201, dvds, ownership, triennial review
Companies: aacs la, dvd cca

Bill Introduced To Fix Broken DMCA Anti-Circumvention Rules

from the but-will-it-get-anywhere dept

It's no secret that the DMCA's section 1201 is extremely problematic. It's the "anti-circumvention" part of the law, that makes it illegal to circumvent "technological protection measures" even if it's for non-infringing purposes. This is a mess -- especially in an age of DRM trying to lock up everything. Try to get around it, and it's a violation of the law -- even if you're not trying to infringe on the underlying material. This is why Cory Doctorow is running a new effort to eradicate DRM with a target placed firmly on Section 1201.

So it's great to see Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Jared Polis team up to introduce a bill to try to reform Section 1201. The full text of the bill (called the "Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act of 2015") has a lot of good things in it. It says that circumventing DRM or other technology protection measures for non-infringing reasons should no longer be considered against the law. It also expands other exemptions for things like security research and testing and reverse engineering. It also would automatically renew the exemptions the Librarian of Congress issues every few years so we don't have a repeat of the mess from a few years ago where the Librarian of Congress used the "triennial review" process to first grant an exemption to 1201 for unlocking mobile phones... and then to take that exemption away six years later.

Overall it's a good bill -- and I'm curious to understand how anyone could possibly push back on it, though Hollywood absolutely refuses to consider any changes to Section 1201. Unfortunately, it also seems unlikely that the bill has enough support to actually go anywhere. It seems a bit telling that Wyden released this bill the same day as the fast track bill, suggesting that it's a signal of some sort to people that he's not giving up on fixing copyright law. It's unlikely, however, that this gesture will mollify the folks who are upset that Wyden allowed the fast track bill to move forward in its current form.

Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, copyright, dmca, dmca 1201, exemptions, jared polis, ron wyden, technological protection measures, triennial review

How The DMCA And Anti-Piracy Measures Conspire To Keep Video Games In Their Cultural Place

from the that-belongs-in-a-museum dept

For those of us that think certain intellectual property laws have become overbearing and overly burdensome, one of the fun little exercises is to try and figure out where the best battlegrounds are for the fight against them. For instance, if you think cable television has become expensive, unfriendly, and overtly insane, you want to pay special attention to how professional sports are broadcasted now and in the future. If you want to find ground to battle expanded trademark protections and the crazy ways some companies interpret their rights, perhaps the alcohol and beer industry is a good place to draw a line in the proverbial sand. And for copyright? Well, there has always been a ton of focus on music and movies, but we may be seeing the world of video games emerge as the best ground from which to push back against the restrictions of antiquated copyright in the digital age.

Recently, we covered the spiderweb of nonsense one company had to go through just to try to publish a decade-old game, an attempt that was ultimately given up because the web proved to be too convoluted to navigate. Now, a Consumerist post explains how the DMCA and game publishers have (perhaps) unwittingly conspired to keep video games from claiming their rightful place within our cultural lexicon. The focus in the post is on section 1201 of the DMCA.

Section 1201 of the DMCA prohibits consumers from circumventing copyright protection measures put in place on games or any other digital media. So even if you can figure out a fix that will make a game work offline — much like the Sim City player who discovered a work-around against the disastrous always-online requirement — it’s against the law to do so, even if you’re not otherwise violating the copyright and even if this is the only way to make an abandoned game viable again. Yes, somehow keeping it illegal to fix broken, abandoned games aids in this innovation; perhaps by forcing people to keep buying newer releases.

The piece then draws up two conflicting sides on section 1201 with regards to video games: the Entertainment Software Association on one side and the EFF on the other. The EFF has filed a request to have exemptions put in to section 1201 for gaming enthusiasts and, more importantly, for museums who would need to alter the game in order to make it in any way useful for exhibit. Take, for instance, any of the games that Electronic Arts, member of the ESA, decides to torpedo in whole or in part by shutting down game servers that support or check-in with the software. Or, perhaps more apropos, take any of the myriad of recent games that have been released as "always online," with copyright protections essentially amounting to a check in with servers not in the consumer's control. What happens when those servers are no longer worth supporting and are shut down? Well, some or all of the game becomes un-playable.

Now, let's leave aside the question of whether or not a consumer truly owns the game they buy under these scenarios. Let's also leave aside whether this kind of DRM or copyright protection is worthwhile at all. Instead, let's focus on how curators of games can handle this kind of thing in a world where DMCA section 1201 forbids the kind of tampering that would get around these restrictions. Should the ESA get its way and keep 1201 exemption-free, so-called abandoned games or abandonware becomes abandoned culture. And not, by the way, abandoned by the consumer or the public, which might include museums or academics with a strong interest in curating older games. No, the abandonment is committed by the game company itself, leaving a giant cultural hole that cannot be filled in because of a copyright law section those same companies are defending.

I've long argued that video games should be considered every bit the equivalent of movies and music. Try to find an equivalent to this problem with either music or movies, however, and you'll be at it quite a long time before you find anything meaningful. Netflix doesn't count, because you aren't buying a movie in Netflix. Same with music streaming services. The closest thing to it is probably how some e-readers can disappear books the consumer has purchased. The difference there is that the entire cultural deposit with a literary work likely isn't lost when that sort of thing happens, as it can be found and curated in other forms. That's not the case with old and classic games.

You want to find a place to take a stance against expanded copyright in favor of greater culture? That place is with games. The ESA knows this, which is why it is staunchly defending section 1201.

The gaming industry argues that allowing these modifications would “undermine the fundamental copyright principles on which our copyright laws are based,” and send the message that “hacking… is lawful.”

In fact, as the EFF points out, “hacking” in and of itself is completely legal.

“Most of the programmers that create games for Sony, Microsoft, EA, Nintendo, and other ESA members undoubtedly learned their craft by tinkering with existing software,” writes the EFF. “If ‘hacking,’ broadly defined, were actually illegal, there likely would have been no video game industry.”

And no cultural boon from games as a result. Section 1201, within the framework of gaming, can be said to be firmly anti-culture. No two ways about it.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, copyright, dmca, exceptions, triennial review, video games

Copyright Law Is Eating Away At Our Cultural History: And It's Time To Fix That

from the archiving-history-is-great dept

If you weren't under a social media-less rock a few weeks ago, you hopefully heard about the Internet Archive releasing over 2,000 MS-DOS video games, playable in the browser. As I noted to someone on Twitter, it was like half of my childhood on the screen. What I found truly amazing was that with every excited Twitter or Facebook comment I saw, it was about a different game. For me, it was things like Oregon Trail, Pole Position, Lode Runner and Championship Baseball (and also some college memories of avoiding studying by playing Scorched Earth -- hey, at least it sorta felt like I was learning physics). But for others it was something entirely different. Each person seemed to latch onto their own moment in history (and a new chance to procrastinate or waste time by reliving that experience).

This, of course, was only the latest in an ongoing effort by the Internet Archive, led by Jason Scott (who has been involved in all sorts of archival efforts of internet content and video games and made a documentary about text adventure games called Get Lamp). Andy Baio has a great post up discussing this work and how important it is that it's being done by the Internet Archive, rather than a giant corporation. As he notes, while Google used to really focus on similar archival projects, in the recent past, it seems to have let that focus fade, which is quite disappointing.

Of course, in discussing the possible reasons why Google's archival efforts have stagnated, Baio tosses out a few suggested reasons, including the lack of profitability, but also, the potential legal liability. After all, Google is still fighting in court about the Google book scanning project, and the focus of that project seems much more about pushing people to buy books, rather than being able to do useful searches through that huge corpus of knowledge.

Baio is (quite reasonably) thrilled that the Internet Archive has been willing and able to step up, and notes that the video game archive shows how Archive.org is a lot more than just saving old websites: it's about preserving our cultural history.

But, other than that one offhand mention of the risk of legal liability to explain Google's dropping the ball on similar stuff, Baio leaves out the related issue of copyright and the DMCA (which he knows about all too well from personal experience). This isn't a fault of Baio's article, he's just focused on something else. But the copyright aspect is really important -- especially right now.

That's because the main reason why the Internet Archive is allowed to do this kind of thing is because it was lucky enough to get one of the semi-arbitrary DMCA triennial review exemptions that lets them break old DRM for the purpose of archiving vintage software. But, even then, it's not entirely clear that what the Internet Archive is doing is fully protected today. Furthermore, as we saw a few years ago with unlocking mobile phones, the Librarian of Congress can simply delete those exemptions on a whim.

And, right now, we're in the middle of the DMCA exemption process yet again, with a bunch of requests on tap -- including an important one from the EFF [pdf] to allow such activities:

Proposed Class: Literary works in the form of computer programs, where circumvention is undertaken for the purpose of restoring access to single-player or multiplayer video gaming on consoles, personal computers or personal handheld gaming devices when the developer and its agents have ceased to support such gaming.

Baio's article talks about how projects like the one at the Internet Archive are magical in preserving history and giving us access to "all of computing history... accessible from a single click." This is incredibly important -- but copyright law is standing in its way. This isn't about "piracy" in any real sense. The games and software being discussed are not being sold anywhere. The hardware that it worked on is long gone. This is about preserving our cultural history -- something that industry appears to have no interest in doing, in part because copyright law itself makes it so risky.

If you think things like this are important too, I also suggest heading over to the Digital Right to Repair site where they've made a really easy form for you to share your thoughts with the Copyright Office as it considers the latest exemption requests. The Copyright Office also has its own form, but it's government-level cumbersome. The Digital Right to Repair site is much easier to use. It has some pre-selected text for the various exemptions being debated, but also (very easily) allows you to write your own thoughts (which you should).

One of the key factors in the decision over what to exempt and what not to exempt is a demonstrated "market need" and you can help make the case by sharing your story with the Copyright Office.

Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, archives, archiving, copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 1201, drm, exemptions, jason scott, librarian of congress, libraries, triennial review, video games
Companies: internet archive

Cory Doctorow To Push For Ending DRM

from the good-day-to-announce-this dept

This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today's topic is "you bought it, you own it," -- a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA -- the You Own Devices Act -- which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the devices with the software on it without creating a copyright mess. It was a small attempt to take back basic property rights from copyright law which often stamps out property rights. Hopefully, a similar bill will show up in the new Congress, and become law. Even better would be for copyright law to actually recognize true property rights, rather than limiting them at nearly every turn.

One of the biggest attacks on property rights and ownership is Section 1201 of the DMCA, better known as the Anti-Circumvention clause, that says it's against the law to circumvent any "technological measures" that were designed to block copying -- even if the underlying use is non-infringing. That is, if you break technological measures to access content that is not covered by copyright at all, you're still violating the law. This is the law that has made DRM so powerful, and which regularly removes your right to own what you bought. It's a blatant attack on basic property rights, and (even worse) has copyright maximalists pretending that their removal of property rights is actually a move in favor of property rights.

Thus, it's great to see the announcement today that Cory Doctorow is returning to EFF to help with its new Apollo 1201 Project, a plan to eradicate DRM in our lifetime.

"Apollo was a decade-long plan to do something widely viewed as impossible: go to the moon. Lots of folks think it's impossible to get rid of DRM. But it needs to be done," said Doctorow. "Unless we can be sure that our computers do what we tell them, and don't have sneaky programs designed to take orders from some distant corporation, we can never trust them. It's the difference between 'Yes, master' and 'I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT DAVE.'"

Doctorow has been speaking out on this issue for years. If you haven't watched his 2012 talk at the Chaos Communication Congress on the "war on general purpose computing," it's well worth your time. It's a discussion I've gone back to many times in the two and a half years since he first gave that talk. It highlights not only the absurdity of DRM in general, but why this is an issue that goes well beyond just the idea of locking down some content to protect an obsolete business model. As his speech noted, this is a battle over the right to actually own your computer and not to open it up to censorship and surveillance. The fight over DRM on content was just the beginning:

And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, apollo 1201, apollo 1201 project, copyright, cory doctorow, dmca, drm, general purpose computing, yoda
Companies: eff

How Publishers & Copyright Gave Amazon The Very Power That Publishers Now Hate

from the which-was-totally-predictable dept

We've been meaning to weigh in some more on the whole Amazon/Hachette battle, because lot of misinformation has been spewed around (including by Paul Krugman). Unfortunately there have just been too many other things to cover and we haven't had the time to do a more thorough piece. However, Tim Lee, over at Vox, has a good short piece detailing how many of the publishers' problems are really because of copyright law and the stupid DRM that the publishers themselves demanded -- and which now gives Amazon its power over them in the market. The issue? The DMCA and the fact that Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent any DRM (even if for non-infringing purposes). End result, all those books on Amazon are stuck on Amazon.

Amazon has taken advantage of the DMCA too. Kindle books come copy-protected so that only Amazon-approved software can read it without breaking the law. Of course, software to convert it to other formats exists, but it's illegal and accordingly isn't very convenient or user-friendly.

And that creates a huge barrier to entry. People who want to create new e-reader apps or devices can't do what MP3 startups did in the 1990s and offer to automatically import your existing e-books from Kindle, iTunes, or other major platforms. Instead, they have to start from scratch, creating their own e-book store and convincing all the major publishers to sign up for it.

Even more daunting, they have to convince customers to toss their existing e-book libraries and buy new copies of their e-books on the new platform — or split their time between multiple platforms.

The thing is, none of this is even remotely surprising. Almost six years ago, we warned book publishers of this exact scenario. This wasn't hard to predict, because the same damn thing had happened in music, before Apple finally dumped its music DRM. But no one listens to us.

And yet, you can bet that if changing the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA is up for discussion during the next effort at copyright reform, the book publishers and their lobbyists will actually be among the most vocal about keeping it the way it is. They still don't seem to recognize how their own demands for DRM created the situation they're so worried about today with Amazon having more power than the publishers like.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, copyright, dmca, dmca 1201, drm, ebooks, lock-in, publishers
Companies: amazon

Administration Proudly Announces That If Your 'We The People' Petition Aligns With Its Priorities, Something Might Actually Happen

from the go-team-Government! dept

Let's get this right out in the open. I don't have any particular animosity towards this administration. I just don't find it to be an improvement over the last one (which I found to be pretty much terrible from all angles). This wouldn't be notable except for the fact that this administration definitely considers itself to be a vast improvement over the last one and has made several proclamations advancing that theory. ("Most transparent administration," anyone?)

We fully expect politicians to be self-serving and those sitting atop the heap to be the most self-serving of all. The White House blog has taken the passage of the cell phone-unlocking bill as an opportunity to toot lean on its own horn.

On Friday, August 1, President Obama signed a bill into law that again made it legal for consumers to unlock their cell phones in order to take them to a carrier that best suits their needs. It marked the very first time a We the People petition led to a legislative fix.

This last fact -- the first time a petition resulted in a legislative fix -- should be an admission of failure. Instead, it's used to depict the administration as a champion of the people.

The petition, which arose in the aftermath of the Library of Congress' horrible decision to not renew this DMCA exemption, attained the number of signatures needed to obtain a White House response. While many others with the minimum number of signatures have been steadily ignored, the White House responded to this one. Beyond the response posted at the We the People site, more was apparently going on behind the scenes.

Folks here at the White House leapt into action. The White House policy team convened more than a half-dozen agencies and offices' senior officials to ask a simple question: How can we move this issue forward? After careful deliberation, it was clear to us: The Administration couldn’t agree more with petitioners, and we came out in strong support of again making it legal for consumers to unlock their devices.

According to the narrative at the White House blog, the administration did all the heavy lifting and motivated Congress to pass a bill -- though it still took a year and a half for a very narrowly tailored solution that only temporarily addresses the immediate problem, but totally ignores the underlying problem (the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA). But whatever the details behind the scenes, what's out front is more of the same.

The message here is that if your petition happens to align with the administration's priorities/viewpoints, you'll receive a swift response and maybe even some legislative activity. If your petition happens to run contrary to the administration, the best you can expect is some long-delayed talking points in response… if you receive anything at all.

The We the People site is a good idea -- an easy way for citizens to exercise their First Amendment right to petition their government. But that idea has been largely destroyed by the administration's refusal to treat it as anything more than a place to cherry pick requests for PR purposes. If this site's ever going to serve the higher purpose it's supposed to, it needs to be given more than rote recitals of position papers. The administration needs to start responding seriously to petitions that challenge its positions or run contrary to its aims. And it needs to stop ignoring anything that's passed the signature threshold. The way it handles this has little if anything to do with respecting the public's First Amendment rights.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, copyright, petitions, phone unlocking, unlocking, we the people, white house

A Year And A Half Later, Unlocking Your Phone One Step Closer To Being Legal

from the congress-moves-in-mysteriously-slow-ways dept

A year and a half ago, unlocking your mobile phone became illegal thanks to a combination of ridiculous factors, mainly predicated on the DMCA and the way some people interpret its anti-circumvention provisions. For years the Librarian of Congress had carved out a special exemption for phone unlocking -- but what the omnipotent copyright gods of the Librarian of Congress giveth, they can also taketh away, and they did. The situation was so ridiculous that over 100,000 people quickly signed a White House petition protesting this, and the White House (with surprising speed) agreed that phone unlocking should be legal. Though, somewhat bizarrely, the White House seemed to think it was an issue for the FCC to fix, rather than recognizing the underlying fault of copyright law.

Various proposals were raised, but thanks to ridiculous international trade agreements, some of the best proposals ended up on the cutting room floor. I spoke to two separate Congressional staffers who had written up bills to legalize phone unlocking, only to have their international trade experts come in and reject them as likely violating a whole bunch of secretly negotiated trade agreements (and you wonder why we're concerned about things like TPP and TTIP limiting Congress...).

It took about a year before the House finally came up with a bill that had some significant limitations and problems. Despite some last minute protests, that bill passed. Since then, there's been a fair bit of negotiating in the Senate, and it appears that a compromise deal has been struck that should, hopefully, finally legalize phone unlocking a year and a half later. The Senate bill is not perfect (almost no legislation ever is), but it's a big step forward in the right direction.

It still is ridiculous that we're in this situation in the first place, and it should be a sign to look more closely at the problems of the DMCA's anti-circumvention laws. It's equally ridiculous that it's taken a year and a half to "fix" this specific problem, but at least it finally appears that a solution is at hand for the specific issue of unlocking your mobile phone.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, dmca, phone unlocking, senate

UK Finally 'Legalizes' CD & DVD Ripping... But You're Still Not Allowed To Circumvent DRM

from the so-that's-kind-of-meaningless dept

As TorrentFreak is noting, the UK is finally modernizing basic user rights concerning copyright (what they call "fair dealing") to officially make it "legal" to make personal copies of legally acquired copies of digital content. In short, due to restrictive copyright law, it has always been technically infringement in the UK to rip a CD or DVD, but as of June that will change. This was one of the key suggestions in the Hargreaves report from three years ago, so it's good to see it finally being put into action.

That said, this is hardly perfect. It appears that the fair dealing rules still won't let you circumvent DRM in order to make those private copies. In the FAQ the UK government is distributing, we see the following: As that notes, if the media includes DRM, you're basically out of luck:

Media such as DVDs are often protected by anti-copying technology to guard against copyright piracy, and this is protected by law. Copyright owners will still be able to apply this protection. However, if copy protection is too restrictive, you may raise a complaint with the Secretary of State.

Right, so in order to rip a personal copy of a movie so you might, for example, watch it on your tablet, rather than in a DVD player, you first have to "raise a complaint with the Secretary of State" and hope they do something about it? That basically eliminates this new effort entirely. And that's always been the problem with DRM and anti-circumvention rules. They basically give content middlemen the ability to put a veto on user rights, blocking them from doing things that are perfectly legal.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, cd ripping, circumvention, drm, dvd ripping, fair dealing, uk, user rights

Ridiculously Broad Ruling Against DVD Ripper Software Has Court Allow Seizure Of Domains, Social Media & More

from the how-is-that-proper-under-the-law? dept

Who needs SOPA when US judges seem willing to pretend the law already lets them do what SOPA would have created? AACS, the licensing organization that handles the basic encryption used on DVDs, sued one of many DVD ripping software companies, DVDFab (which is based in China). DVD ripping is a somewhat contentious topic. While it's generally accepted (even by the recording industry) that ripping music CDs is legitimate, for whatever reason, Hollywood has fought exceptionally hard against the idea that movies should ever be rippable. With DVD software, they make it "illegal" by placing (weak) DRM on the DVDs, and then claim that any attempt to get around that violates the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, 17 USC 1201.

AACS sought a preliminary injunction against DVDFab, who chose not to respond to the lawsuit (understandable, seeing as it's based halfway around the world). Of course, rather than just granting a basic preliminary injunction, federal judge Vernon Broderick appears to have issued an order that is basically Hollywood's dream: ordering the seizure of basically everything in an attempt to wipe DVDFab off the internet entirely. It orders the company to stop using its website, domain names and social media. Then, it goes way beyond that, using "this Court's inherent equitable power" to order domain registries to disable the company's URLs and make them "transferable" on the orders of the court -- basically ordering the companies to seize the domain names. Then, it also orders all companies who have anything to do with DVDFab to stop doing business with the company. This includes social networking companies, service providers, advertising firms, payment processors and more:

Any third party service providers providing services to Defendants in connection with any of the DVDFab Domain Names, the DVDFab Websites or the DVDFab Social Media Accounts, and who receive actual notice of this Order, including without limitation, web hosting providers, social media or other online service providers (including without limitation, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+), back-end service providers, web designers, distributors, search-based online advertising services (such as through paid inclusion, paid search results, sponsored search results, sponsored links, and Internet keyword advertising), and any banks, savings and loan associations, merchant account providers, payment processors and providers, credit card associations, or other financial institutions which receive or process payments or hold assets on Defendants' behalf (including without limitation, Avangate Inc., Avangate B.V., PayPal, Western Union, PayEase, IPS Ltd., Realypay, WorldPay, Opus Payments, Amazon Payments, WorldPay, Money Gram International, WebMoney, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Visa Electron, Maestro, Solo, Laser, and Carte Bleue) for any Defendant or any of the DVDFab Domain Names or the DVDFab Websites, and who receive actual notice of this Order, shall, within three (3) days of receipt of this Order, cease or disable providing such services to: a) Defendants in relation to the DVDFab Software and/or any other products or services that circumvent the AACS Technology; andb) any and all of the DVDFab Domain Names, the DVDFab Websites or DVDFab Social Media Accounts.

This goes way, way, way beyond the normal remedies put forth under copyright law. In fact, it was these kinds of solutions which SOPA was designed to add to copyright law. I can understand how a judge only hearing one side of a case goes with the "default" judgment and just gives the single party everything they ask for, but at some point doesn't common sense have to come in, and have people point out that this kind of remedy, seeking to wipe an entire company completely off the face of the internet for daring to do something that's basically legal in similar realms (i.e., with music), seems immensely worrisome.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, china, dmca, dvd ripper
Companies: aacs, dvdfab