The Misguided Attacks on Kaleidescape

Here's an ongoing example of the entertainment industry cutting off its nose to spite its face. The players are the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) and a company named Kaleidescape. The DVD CCA is an umbrella organization, mostly made up of entertainment companies, that administers the CSS copy-protection scheme found on DVDs; Kaleidescape makes high-end media servers -- the kind where all your DVD and CD content is copied to a hard disk array, making large volumes of media accessible from remote controls around the house.

For some time now, the DVD CCA has accused Kaleidescape of violating their CSS license by copying DVD movies to their servers. Earlier this year, the Santa Clara Superior Court in California ruled in favor of Kaleidescape -- and now, it turns out the DVD CCA's response is to do an end run by revising their license agreement to expressly prohibit exactly what Kaleidescape is doing.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rightly points out that this is one of the problems with DRM and with the DMCA; both are supposedly tools for protecting intellectual property, yet both can be and are used as weapons to ward off any entity deemed a threat.

Again, it comes back to Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios -- the Betamax case. That case showed that for all their talk of creativity, the entertainment industry's first reaction to new technology it can't immediately control is to try to shut it down. It also showed, in hindsight, that when something comes out of left field and consumers respond to it, it's a better idea in the long run to work with it. Movie companies were scared of the VCR's potential for piracy, but it was the VCR that built the home video market -- which now makes up almost half of the movie industry's total revenue.

If the movie companies behind the DVD CCA stood back and looked at the big picture, they'd realize that Kaleidescape is actually helping, not hurting them. Kaleidescape's customers are well-heeled collectors and people who manage serious media libraries -- so serious that your garden-variety 200-disc carousel isn't anywhere on their radar. (Kaleidescape's 3U Server can hold up to 1,340 DVDs or 15,000 CDs). This is a customer base that spends a ton of money on movies and music, and enthusiastically embraces anything that will solve storage problems. In fact, the general rule of collections, as my wife ruefully understands, is that they expand to fill available space; so if anything, Kaleidescape's servers encourage people to spend more money on movies and music.

The DVD CCA shouldn't be persecuting Kaleidescape, they should be thanking them.