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Judge: RealNetworks caused its own legal problems

// January 11th, 2010 // Tech News

RealNetworks has suffered yet another a legal blow in its battle to bring its DVD ripping software to market, and according to the judge, it’s the company’s own fault.  On Friday, Judge Marilyn Patel dismissed Real’s antitrust claims against the movie industry, saying that the the studios had every right to band together to prevent the sale of RealDVD. Real didn’t suffer any damages at the hands of the studios, either—according to Patel, Real brought the situation on itself by attempting to sell illegal software in the first place. “Help, help, I’m being repressed!” The legal fallout from RealDVD has been showering down since September 2008—before the program was even released to the public. Real claimed that it was able to rip DVDs while still preserving the discs’ copy protection mechanisms . At that time, the company was confident that RealDVD operated well within the DMCA because the software didn’t break CSS encryption—it merely copied data straight to a hard drive, keeping the encryption intact.  Real even added a new layer of DRM to each file to lock it to the user and PC that created the file, which the company thought would keep it on the movie studios’ good side.