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Kaleidescape legal update

Mr.Poindexter

Mr.Poindexter

Well-known member
⭐️ Premium ⭐️
Authorized Kaleidescape Dealer
I just got this email this morning from Kaleidescape:

Dear Kaleidescape Dealer,
Six weeks ago, I wrote to explain that Judge William J. Monahan of the California Superior Court had filed a tentative decision in favor of the DVD CCA. Thursday, Judge Monahan filed his final decision on the matter, again in favor of the DVD CCA. Kaleidescape has appealed this decision, since we have always believed, and continue to believe, that our products fully comply with the DVD CCA's licensing agreement.

Judge Monahan entered his statement of decision and injunction order on March 8, 2012. Kaleidescape filed its appeal on March 9, 2012. Kaleidescape believes that under California law the injunction order should not come into effect unless the California Court of Appeal affirms Judge Monahan's decision. Kaleidescape is confident that when the Court of Appeal reviews the facts of this case, particularly in light of the complete absence of any harm to the DVD CCA or its members, it will reverse the trial court decision. The appeal process may take one to two years.

Since Cheena and I founded the company in 2001, we've been focused on bringing consumers a fantastic experience for enjoying their movie collections. We've invested in building one of the most comprehensive databases of information about DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, including high-resolution cover art and bookmarks for starting movies, scenes, and songs. We've developed two award-winning user interfaces, including one specifically for young children. More recently we released CinemaScape for 2.35 screens and our iPad app. All of these innovations make it more fun to enjoy a movie at home, which leads our customers to purchase even more movies from the motion picture studios.

We believe in a balance between consumer rights and copy control. We strongly believe that individuals have the right to make personal copies of movies they own so they can watch them instantly on any television in their home. We also believe in respecting and protecting the rights of the content creators. So we carefully designed our product not only to preserve the CSS scrambling on the original DVDs, but also to add encryption for greater security. We built a closed system that cannot be used to copy DVDs to or from the Internet, to writable DVDs, or to mobile devices or computers. We built a feature that detects rental DVDs and prevents them from being copied. We required and continue to require that our customers agree to only copy DVDs that they rightfully own, and to reaffirm this agreement each time they copy a disc.

This combination of business practices and technology has been so effective that after years of searching for evidence that Kaleidescape's customers use their systems to steal movies, the DVD CCA admitted in writing that we have done no harm to any of the motion picture studios or to the DVD CCA itself.

We won our first trial in 2007 when Judge Leslie C. Nichols of the California Superior Court found that Kaleidescape's products comply with the CSS license agreement. The DVD CCA appealed to the California Court of Appeal, who in 2009 sent the matter back to the California Superior Court for this second trial.

We appreciate your support through this prolonged struggle, and look forward to working with you to continue improving the way families enjoy their movie collections for years to come. We will continue to keep you informed.
If you are interested in reading the full text of the injunction order, it can be found here.
http://www.kaleidescape.com/files/legal/DVDCCA-vs-Kaleidescape-Injunction-Order-20120308.pdf

Sincerely,
Michael Malcolm
Chairman, Founder and CEO
Kaleidescape, Inc.
 
Reading the injunction, I notice a couple things:

First, it does not mention anything about existing systems other than not allowing software and hardware updates that include "Prohibited Technology".

In other words, there is nothing here that forces them to clamp down on existing systems that I can see.

Second, according to the wording I see here, the ruling would not even allow for a vault solution to the DVD serving as it forbids the persistent copy even if the disc is in the tray the entire time of the playback. In essence, it forbids playing back from the hard drive altogether unless Kaleidescape can somehow only rip to the hard drive during the playback and then wipe the data from the drive as soon as the stop button is pushed or the movie is over. The judge's ruling is actually more onerous than the vault solution for BluRay.
 
Mr.Poindexter said:
Reading the injunction, I notice a couple things:

First, it does not mention anything about existing systems other than not allowing software and hardware updates that include "Prohibited Technology".

In other words, there is nothing here that forces them to clamp down on existing systems that I can see.

Second, according to the wording I see here, the ruling would not even allow for a vault solution to the DVD serving as it forbids the persistent copy even if the disc is in the tray the entire time of the playback. In essence, it forbids playing back from the hard drive altogether unless Kaleidescape can somehow only rip to the hard drive during the playback and then wipe the data from the drive as soon as the stop button is pushed or the movie is over. The judge's ruling is actually more onerous than the vault solution for BluRay.
Click to expand...

I must have misread that . I thought I read that only K cannot copy the "KEY" but that the DVD and the KEY must be present during playback. And I would think this occurs in a vault.. going to read again now
 
Bizarre
I am no lawyer, but I thought you had to be able to demonstrate loss before taking legal action.
 
An Injunction is granted to either compel a party to do something, or prohibit a party from doing something. In either case, the Injunction "can" be ordered to take affect immediately (versus taking affect after an appeal), but normally the party requesting the immediate injunction must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the court that they would suffer "irreparable harm" if the Injunction were delayed. According to the letter referenced by MM, the DVD-CCA has already acknowledged that is not the case.

This just means the fight continues....for DVD content.

Personally, I have not purchased a single DVD in the past year, partly in protest over the DVD-CCA's action against K, partly because of the higher quality afforded by BR. I admit to buying some BR that would have been a DVD purchase if not for the DVD-CCA's actions.


Jim
 
Of course, the dates are not even correct in the statement, as they list the Statement of Decision as April 8, 2012. It lists the judgement as the same date, April 8, 2012. Probably a typo, but bad form to put a typo in a legal judgement, IMO. I don't know how common that is.
 
Not common at all, and that alone presents an issue. (Of course it's easily fixed.)


Jim
 
Mr.Poindexter said:
Of course, the dates are not even correct in the statement, as they list the Statement of Decision as April 8, 2012. It lists the judgement as the same date, April 8, 2012. Probably a typo, but bad form to put a typo in a legal judgement, IMO. I don't know how common that is.
Click to expand...

From Michael Malcolm. (I asked him about that this morning.)
"Our understanding is that April 8 is the effective date of the injunction. We don?t know what the Judge?s reasoning was concerning this date."
 
I'm thinking he gave K 30 days to get the appeal ready, but really have no clue.


Jim
 
As a dealer it's quite a disappointing judgement. You would think the industry would embrace a product that only promotes the actual purchase of content and display it at its very best vs renting and streaming a mediocre experience. It seems though that K could settle this by relenting on the breach of contract suit, grandfather the existing systems and go bluray only using the vault. Let's hope this gets resolved so we can continue to give our customers the very best experience available.
R
 
So basically, kaleidescape appeals the ruling, that stays the injunction until the appeal is done, that takes 1-2 years to be decided, and that might result in the injunction being blocked and then litigation restarts, or the injunction is still allowed, then the case gets appealed to the California supreme court, which ...aaarrhgghg oh crap head hurts!

But there is no change in K selling the DVD systems until and if the appeal survives the appeal.

So no one should buy any DVDs anymore...

Right?
 
Not sure about imerge specifically, but I think most have gone the "BYO DeCSS" route. By doing so, all potential claims shift to the user.

Jeff
 
cinelife said:
but normally the party requesting the immediate injunction must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the court that they would suffer "irreparable harm" if the Injunction were delayed. According to the letter referenced by MM, the DVD-CCA has already acknowledged that is not the case.
Click to expand...

It's "late," so please forgive any "un-massaged" verbage, and the dropping of air-quotes for the remainder of this post...

Since I have seen this pop-up a few times already, does lack of harm really even matter in this case? My understanding is that the DVD-CCA is pursuing it on a strictly contracual basis, which makes it seem like whether or not the most egregious act of piracy we partake in is the sharing of BDA-owned logos for clip-art, is completely beside the point. In the end, isn't it simply judged on the slippery-slope-standard of "if they let one company play fast & lose with the contract, it becomes harder to uphold against the next company actually violating the terms"? In such an argument, the regular standard of doing no harm (or even providing for a beneficial outcome) appears to hold no weight as a defense.
 
Beginning of the end

So, is this the beginning of the end for Kaleidescape? I have been considering swapping my 5U server for a 1U server but I now think I will just let it die. We have fibre broadband in London now which makes streaming Blu Ray quality movies from a service like iTunes very practicable. I'm thinking that's the way to go now. Am I alone?
 
Transepoch said:
It's "late," so please forgive any "un-massaged" verbage, and the dropping of air-quotes for the remainder of this post...

Since I have seen this pop-up a few times already, does lack of harm really even matter in this case? My understanding is that the DVD-CCA is pursuing it on a strictly contracual basis, which makes it seem like whether or not the most egregious act of piracy we partake in is the sharing of BDA-owned logos for clip-art, is completely beside the point. In the end, isn't it simply judged on the slippery-slope-standard of "if they let one company play fast & lose with the contract, it becomes harder to uphold against the next company actually violating the terms"? In such an argument, the regular standard of doing no harm (or even providing for a beneficial outcome) appears to hold no weight as a defense.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, Jim has given you the letter definition of what would be required for the injunction to begin immediately. In my experience the law does not get construed in the way you are getting at. You do make a good point, but that's just not how its construed.
 
shuffleboard said:
So, is this the beginning of the end for Kaleidescape? I have been considering swapping my 5U server for a 1U server but I now think I will just let it die. We have fibre broadband in London now which makes streaming Blu Ray quality movies from a service like iTunes very practicable. I'm thinking that's the way to go now. Am I alone?
Click to expand...

Is the lawsuit the beginning of the end for K? I think no.

Is the move to streaming and downloading by the mass market with formats that may not be quite as good as BR but are "close enough" the end for K? Possibly. The answer depends on how K proceeds from here.

What actions should we as system owners/ clients/ take? My action is to keep being a customer because Kaleidescape still delivers the best experience I've seen and I also have a pretty good investment into my system. I also prioritize image and audio quality and I get that with the Kaleidescape.
 
JerryL said:
Is the lawsuit the beginning of the end for K? I think no.

Is the move to streaming and downloading by the mass market with formats that may not be quite as good as BR but are "close enough" the end for K? Possibly. The answer depends on how K proceeds from here.

What actions should we as system owners/ clients/ take? My action is to keep being a customer because Kaleidescape still delivers the best experience I've seen and I also have a pretty good investment into my system. I also prioritize image and audio quality and I get that with the Kaleidescape.
Click to expand...

Well put and K is lucky to have such loyal customers.
 
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