This week a landmark verdict was handed down to RealNetworks with deep implications for fair use and personal property in America. The ruling wasn't about filesharing, piracy, or malicious computer use. Rather, it was fight over whether users should be able to make copies of digital content that they legal own. And in a precedent-setting decision, the media companies beat a small software vendor and fair use advocates and laid down an imposing decision -- copying DVDs that you own is illegal.

The suit filed against RealNetworks centered around the company's RealDVD software, which ripped through protection technology to allow users to make digital copies of their legally-owned content. RealNetworks had plans to release a DVD drive/software bundle called Facet, which would make the process even quicker and easier.

The company's business model, though, was put to the legal test. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed suit against the company over alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and breach of contract in a lawsuit filed last fall. The MPAA's assertion was simple -- consumers do not have the right to copy DVD movies -- ever.

RealNetwork's defense was that the ARccOS and RipGuard protection technologies it circumvented weren't designed as anti-copying technologies, and further that anti-copying technology was built on CSS, something that RealNetworks held patents on and licensed. It argued that as it owned these rights, it had a right to alter the resulting software This defense fell apart when it was established that ARccOS and RipGuard are not, in fact, included in the CSS license.

Read the entire article at DailyTech.