Defiant Kaleidescape To Keep Shipping Movie Servers

Although a California judge has legally blocked the sale of Kaleidescape's DVD servers, the company said Monday that it intends to ship products until if and when an appellate court upholds the decision.

On March 8, Judge William J. Monaghan of the Santa Clara County district court issued a notice of injunction against Kaleidescape, ruling that the company was in breach of the CSS license agreement that it entered into with the DVD Copy Control Association, or DVD CCA.

Kaleidescape currently manufactures servers that allow consumers or businesses to rip a DVD, Blu-ray Disc, or CD and store its contents on a hard drive. However, the company has also agreed to store the disc in the drive during playback, which Hollywood wanted to eliminate the issue of "rip and return," where consumers rented a DVD, ripped it, and then effectively pirated it for their own permanent use.

Since then, of course, cloud-based services like Netflix have dented that model, streaming a movie directly to a consumer's client device via an encrypted stream.

Monday's ruling stems from a 2009 decision, when Kaleidescape lost its chance to appeal to the state's superior court on the contract issue. Instead, the case was remanded back to the Santa Clara County Superior Court, where the DVD Copy Control Association filed its original suit.

Judge Monaghan's notice was dated April 8, to give time to Kaleidescape to prepare for the injunction, a DVD CCA spokesman said in an email.

Meanwhile, Kaleidescape said it believed it has the legal right to ship products until an appeal of the latest ruling dashed all hope.

"Judge Monahan entered his statement of decision and injunction order on March 8, 2012. Kaleidescape filed its appeal on March 9, 2012," the company said in a statement. "Kaleidescape believes that under California law the injunction order should not come into effect unless the California Court of Appeal affirms Judge Monahan's decision. Kaleidescape is confident that when the Court of Appeal reviews the facts of this case, particularly in light of the complete absence of any harm to the DVD CCA or its members, that it will reverse the trial court decision. The appeal process may take one to two years."

For his part, Michael Malcolm, Kaleidescape's chairman, founder, and CEO, said in 2009 that he believed his company could continue to ship product, legally. "I am very confident that however it goes, we'll continue to stay in business and ship our products," Malcolm said then.

For more from Mark, follow him on Twitter @MarkHachman.

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Defiant Kaleidescape To Keep Shipping Movie Servers

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