Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

According the Wall Street Journal, movie studios began to drastically increase the prices of DVDs that came with the right to download a digital copy of a movie to one’s computer. However, it is now up to a federal judge to decide the legality of this issue questioning whether or not the studios are the only ones to profit. In April, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco opened up a hearing to assess whether RealNetworks are allowed to sell a computer program named RealDVD which allows consumer to copy purchased DVDs onto personal computers. Prior to this issue, the studios won the temporary right to ban the sale of RealDVD; if the program is allowed back on the market, studios may lose their efforts to gain profit from the digital copies of DVDs. The question is whether or not it is worth it now for consumers to purchase high priced DVDs, when there is a piece of software which allows someone to get the same thing for free.

Most importantly, studios wish to keep control of their own products and do not want outside companies to become involved with a piece of the profit. With studios earning over $13 million in profit from the sale of DVDs last year, this issue becomes imperative for the studios to be proactive on the ban of Real sales. Furthermore, the studios claim that this is an infringement of the DMCA because nobody can make copies of a movie without the permission of the copyright holder. Although Real claims that its product is only for personal use, a spokeswoman for the MPAA claims, “What Real is actually doing is usurping our product.”