Hollywood sues their only friend

First, let's introduce the company. Kaleidescape is a 3-year-old Canadian company that produces the world's best, and most expensive, DVD jukebox system. For a princely sum of $27,000 (that's US dollars, people), the Kaleidescape DVD Jukebox stores 500 of your favorite DVDs on multiple internal hard disk drives. The company's proprietary technology makes a perfect "bit-for-bit" copy of the disk, so all extras, angles, subtitles, languages, and, oh yeah, the movie itself, are all duplicated. Once stored, you can use their very clever TV-based user interface to browse and select your favorite movie. In fact, when we saw them at EH Expo, we were introduced to a feature that lets you make a "playlist" of your favorite scenes, such as car chases, from your entire library, then watch it all in a loop.

Here's Kaleidescape back at CEDIA (click on the image for a full-screen view):



Key to the Kaleidescape story: they've spent years working WITH the DVD Forum, Hollywood studios, and anyone they can find to make sure they are doing everything legitimately. In fact, part of the reason the units cost so much is to pay off the enormous licensing fees imposed on the secure technologies they are using. One component of the system is you can watch movies stored in the server from multiple rooms of the house. In perfect quality.

Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, some greedy folks have decided to go after them. The DVD Copy Control Association, the group that owns the copy-protection technology contained on DVDs, said Kaleidescape is offering products that illegally make copies of DVDs. But wait, the story gets interesting: Kaleidescape has been working with the CCA for over a year!

Ready for the really eggregious part? Check this out:

Bill Coats, a DVD CCA attorney, said in a statement. "While Kaleidescape obtained a license to use CSS, the company has built a system to do precisely what the license and CSS are designed to prevent--the wholesale copying of protected DVDs."

"We are flabbergasted by this lawsuit," Kaleidescape president Michael Malcolm said. "We have gone to great pains to make our system comply 100 percent with licenses and all the associated technical procedures and requirements."

Company president Michael Malcolm:



So let me get this straight: despite the fact that my parents have the ability to copy DVDs onto their computer's hard drive for free, and this is now common and easy to do, Hollywood is going to make an example out of who? A startup Canadian company who is playing by their rules and paying them money to do so. Not only that, Kaleidescape is selling a product at such a ridiculously high price point that its consumer base is the very batch of people buying, not downloading, but buying lots of DVDs!!!

I just don't get it... They pick the ONE company who is actually trying to do it right AND who's consumer base does NOT focus around piracy of content... It's hard to stomach.

Links:

Read the article from CNET News.com

Kaleidescape home page

Alice and Bill add some comments