A new trial is set to open in a...
A new trial is set to open in a California state court the first week of December on DVD Copy Control Association allegations that Kaleidescape breached its CSS license agreement, DVD CCA spokesman Greg Larsen said Friday. “While a judge…
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has not yet been assigned, it will be a different judge than the one in the first case,” Larsen said. DVD CCA sued in 2004 alleging Kaleidescape breached terms of the CSS license contained in a “general specifications” document that require the physical DVD disc to be present in a device during playback of a movie. The trial court sided with Kaleidescape, saying the general specifications document wasn’t part of the CSS license, but an appeals court reversed that decision last summer and remanded the case to the lower court for a new trial. Larsen said the dispute with Kaleidescape is a breach of contract, not a copyright, case, and it’s not accurate to say Kaleidescape has prevailed on fair-use grounds (CED June 17 p6). Though Kaleidescape’s new Blu-ray products require the presence of a physical disc for playing back a movie, unlike for DVD where a physical disc is not required, that’s for the benefit of consumers, Diana Cartwright, the company’s vice president of corporate marketing, told us in an e-mail. She didn’t address the DVD CCA’s lawsuit, but defended Kaleidescape products as “100 percent legal.” Importing a Blu-ray movie into a Kaleidescape system “has many benefits,” Cartwright said. “The movie then becomes part of your library and appears on the onscreen user interface,” she said. Doing so will activate “a host of great features,” including faster start times and multi-room playback, she said. Meanwhile, Kaleidescape hasn’t announced pricing on the high-capacity Blu-ray “disc vault” that the company expects to ship first half next year, she said. “Kaleidescape is developing the disc vault to enable the full Kaleidescape experience for Blu-ray,” she said. “This vault, which will keep a large number of discs present within the Kaleidescape system, will also provide bulk import, and make it easy to find and retrieve a disc. … When an imported Blu-ray movie is selected for playback, the vault does not need to spin around to insert the disc in the reader. The movie will be played from the server, not the disc in the loader.”