Kaleidescape Loses in DVD-Copying Battle, Too

By  |  Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 3:09 pm

KaleidescapeFor years, the high-end consumer-electronics device known as Kaleidescape has provided good reason to  wish you were filthy rich. Starting at around $8,000 but mostly going way, way up from there, the systems let you store DVDs to hard disks and browse and watch them from multiple TVs around your house. But the DVD-copying aspect–which can be approximated with free software and a cheap network drive–was only part of the product’s appeal. What really made it interesting was the software, which sported one of the slickest, most thoughtful user interfaces this side of Cupertino. It’s like what Apple TV might be on an unlimited budget, if it let you enjoy the DVD movies you’d already bought rather than making you pay to download them again.

Now Kaleidescape has suffered a court defeat to Hollywood, just a day after RealDVD (which is a sort of poor man’s Kaleidescape in software form) did. Two years ago, Kaleidescape won a rare victory relating to DVD-copying in the digital age, but a California state appellate judge has overturned that decision. As I understand it, the Kaleidescape case doesn’t involve questions of fair use but whether Kaleidescape abused the license it obtained from the DVD Copy Control Association for CSS, the encryption standard used to lock up DVDs. But I’d still rather see products like RealDVD and Kaleidescape win in court than lose. The ruling won’t force Kaleidescape to pull products off the market immediately, and could be overturned.

Greg Sandoval’s piece on Kaleidescape and RealDVD at Cnet has one shred of sort-of-good news: Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who ruled in the RealDVD case, said that she wasn’t saying that consumers definitely don’t have the right to back up their DVDs under certain circumstances. But here’s a bit of big-picture optimism: The Betamax case which established fair-use ground rules for copied movies in the first place got all the way to the Supreme Court before Sony (and, indirectly, consumers) scored definitive victory over the studios. Let’s hope that both Kaleidescape and Real have plenty of fight left in them.

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. Mike Says:
    August 12th, 2009 at 3:16 pm

    just set up a home media server, rip your dvd’s and distribute to small client pc’s hooked up to tv’s running Media Center in your house. you can setup multiple TV’s and a server with a ton of storage space for less than a quarter of the price of the kaleidascope.

    i started this project a few years ago, now I have 2 TV’s hooked up, about 350 movies and over 30 tv shows (every season every episode) and the system is easy enough to use that my wife got it without me giving her any lessons, which says A LOT! about how easy it is to navigate.

  2. AJ Says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 5:35 am

    I have my movies ripped as ISOs, stored in my NAS and streamed across the home via XBMC on original Xboxes. I have my own “poor man’s Kaleidascape.”

  3. tom b Says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 6:00 am

    “The Betamax case which established fair-use ground rules for copied movies in the first place got all the way to the Supreme Court before Sony (and, indirectly, consumers) scored definitive victory over the studios.”

    Hope it doesn’t hit the Supreme Court anytime soon. Under the Bush Supreme Court, “consumers” are simply cannon fodder for foreign “adventures”; they have NO rights (except that created right that isn’t in the Constitution, about individuals bearing arms).