Thu May 15, 2003 07:48 PM ET
By Bob Tourtellotte
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood's major movie studios on Thursday turned up the legal heat on makers of DVD copying software, squaring off against one company in a California court and suing five others in New York.
In the latest development, lawyers for Paramount Pictures Corp. and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. filed for an injunction in U.S. District Court in New York to bar five companies from selling DVD copying software.
The suit names Internet Enterprises Inc., RDestiny LLC, HowtocopyDVDs.com, DVDBackupbuddy.com and DVDSqueeze.com as defendants. None could immediately be reached for comment.
In federal court in San Francisco, lawyers for other film companies argued that the DVD X Copy and DVD Copy Plus software made by St. Louis-based 321 Studios could not be judged to be legal because it violates copyright law.
Both suits center on the same basic issue of whether selling DVD copying software is illegal under 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act as the studios claim, or whether it is legal under "fair use" provisions of U.S. copyright law as the companies believe.
Last year, in its preemptory suit, 321 asked a federal judge to rule its software did not violate the DMCA. The studios, under the Motion Picture Association of America, countersued seeking a summary judgment to dismiss the case.
On Thursday, Judge Susan Illston of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, heard arguments from attorneys, then adjourned to consider the case, according to both sides. The judge did not say when she might issue a ruling, they said.
BILLIONS AT STAKE
At stake in the cases, the movie studios argue, are potentially billions of dollars in lost future revenues if people can make perfect, digital copies of movies on DVD, then put the movies in digital files stored on the Internet to be distributed around the world, free.
321 claims people have the right to copy DVDs for personal use to make backups in case their DVDs are lost or damaged.
The company, which Moore said has sold some 500,000 versions of its software, has said teachers use it to copy portions of a DVD to use in presentations to classes or seminars. Doing so, 321 believes, falls under the "fair use" provisions of U.S. copyright law.
The studios and the MPAA claim "fair use" isn't the issue because circumventing copy protection is illegal.
"At the end of the day, this is not a lawsuit against consumers or about copyright infringement. It is a lawsuit about a company that traffics in an illegal product," said Russell Frackman, attorney for the MPAA.
The studios involved in the 321 suit are various divisions of Sony Corp. 6758.T , AOL Time Warner Inc. AOL.N , Walt Disney Co.DIS.N , Vivendi Universal EAUG.PA , Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. MGM.N , Pixar Animation Studios Inc. PIXR.O and Saul Zaentz Co.
Paramount Pictures is a unit of Viacom Inc. VIAb.N, and Twentieth Century Fox is part of the Fox Entertainment Group FOX.N unit of News Corp. Ltd. NCP.AX .
