Software expert witness Robert Schumann testified yesterday for a group of Hollywood studios in the case against RealNetworks. Plaintiffs allege that Real identified and actively worked to remove the copy protections from DVD discs with its software product, RealDVD. The expert stated that he was able to copy seven movies to a thumb drive that was completely unprotected and lacked the device key that a DVD drive included. Plaintiff’s attorney Rohit Singla implied that RealDVD had circumvented the device key. PCMag.com reports:
Singla tried to make the point that DVDs contain several copy-protection mechanisms, which RealNetworks allegedly methodically identified and worked to supercede. The protections included both device and bus encryption, part of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) code that must be included with every DVD. But Singla also attempted to point out that many DVDs come with two third-party pieces of copy-protection software licensed by Macrovision and Sony DADC, called ARccOS and RipGuard, which have been placed on DVDs to give them additional copy protection.