HILE the film industry has forced 321
Studios, a Missouri company, to stop selling software that can copy
Hollywood movies sold on DVD's, its success may be limited.
Purveyors of software tools that can do the same thing, sometimes
better, are flourishing on the Internet - and the wares are often
free.
The availability and apparently widespread use of such tools is
fostering debate about the legality and the ethical implications of
such copying by individual consumers - including people who copy
DVD's onto a computer to avoid carrying a disc while they travel, or
to keep children from damaging the originals - who do not distribute
copies of the DVD as pirates do.
The free copying tools are available through Internet sites that
are not directly subject to American law, often because the nations
that those sites call home permit individuals to copy material for
their own use.
People seeking such tools need only pose the question in an
Internet search engine to find dozens of sites devoted to the
subject, including the Afonic DVD Guides site (www .dvd-guides.com),
run by Joseph Chatzimichail, a 20-year-old electrical and computer
engineering student in Salonika, Greece.
The site draws about 100,000 visitors each month, Mr.
Chatzimichail said, most of them looking for advice on what tools to
use, where to get them - the site does not carry such tools - and
how to use them. He and the others who help manage the message
boards on the site have no tolerance for pirates, he said.
"Many people ask how to copy rented DVD's or how to convert
downloaded movies to DVD, and of course they are informed that it is
illegal and the thread is closed," Mr. Chatzimichail said.
"Personally I believe that a user should be able to back up a DVD he
owns. I don't understand why movies should be different than other
media, like audio CD's; it is obviously the same thing."
Photocopying a magazine article or recording a television
broadcast on a VCR is generally considered legal under the fair-use
provision of American copyright law. In the electronic realm,
however, it may be illegal for individuals in the United States to
circumvent any antipiracy measures that might be used to prevent
copying material on something like a DVD.
Film studios have successfully argued that three programs sold by
321 Studios violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998,
which forbids the distribution or use of any program that cracks
digital copyright-protection systems, whether or not the ultimate
purpose is illegal. This year a series of legal rulings forced 321
Studios to remove the copying software from the market.
The Federal District Court judge in one case, Susan Illston of
San Francisco, was unswayed by arguments that users of the company's
products did not routinely engage in piracy or otherwise damage the
market for DVD movies. "It is the technology itself at issue, not
the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put," she wrote in
her opinion.
Before the software from 321 Studios was withdrawn from the
market, a million people had paid for its DVD-copying programs,
according to the company.
The programs had become popular partly because making a copy of a
DVD with the free tools available on the Internet was until recently
a demanding task. The 321 programs automated the process, making it
easy for even nontechnical users; some of the free tools available
on the Internet do likewise, automatically synchronizing the audio
track with the images, for example. While copying tools are also
available commercially, the quality, power and flexibility of the
free tools on the Internet put those products to shame.
It typically takes four to eight hours to copy a DVD movie onto a
hard drive. The copied data can take up a great deal of space, from
two to eight gigabytes, though many tools can compress the raw data
into a gigabyte or so as a way of saving space at the cost of a
slightly degraded picture or sound. By way of comparison, the
typical hard drive in a laptop computer today averages 60 gigabytes.
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