As part of the MPAA’s campaign against DVD piracy, a Cal. state c...

July 23 by L.A. County Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis, came in response to a suit filed by 7 major U.S. movie studios, which claimed ESS violated its license for DVD’s Content Scramble System (CSS). According to the MPAA, its copy protection compliance testing lab recently purchased and examined an undisclosed brand of DVD player/recorder that it said illegally copied DVDs to recordable discs. The investigation discovered that ESS chips were used in the deck, whose manufacturer lacked a CSS license from the DVD Copy Control Assn. By providing CSS descrambling chips for use in an unlicensed and unauthorized device, ESS was in violation of its CSS contract, the MPAA said. It said that in issuing the preliminary injunction, Judge Duffy-Lewis also indicated ESS was in violation of its contract. “By selling chips to unlicensed manufacturers, ESS was effectively enabling wholesale piracy, facilitating unauthorized copies of DVDs that make their way onto the Internet and into the hands of pirates around the world,” said Dan Robbins, MPAA chief technology counsel. The MPAA said its members intend to vigorously pursue the matter to ensure that ESS operates within the parameters of the CSS license agreement. An ESS spokeswoman said the company denied any wrongdoing and would investigate the matter further. Ted Shapiro, chief counsel for the international MPA, told Consumer Electronics Daily earlier this year that it and the MPAA had begun a program to test new equipment for compliance with DVD’s CSS specs -- as well as compliance with DVD’s Copy Generation Management System for analogy copying (CGMS-A). DVD players made within the past 2 years are supposed to pass along the CGMS-A flag if present on a DVD, to signal a DVD recorder to prohibit copying -- older players can’t recognize the flag or pass it on. Although most DVD recorders are capable of recognizing the flag, it’s estimated that about half of all new players don’t pass it on to the recorder -- or don’t do so correctly. Owing to vagueness in the CGMS-A spec, the issue is more pronounced in Europe and countries that use the PAL video standard than in NTSC countries such as the U.S. and Japan. Additionally, it’s not know to what extent the movie studios implement CGMS-A on their DVDs, or if it’s embedded in the correct place for compliant players to read it. As for the compliance testing program, Shapiro told us that “in most cases, simple follow-up letters suffice to resolve any difficulties [with CE manufacturers] and as a result the matter is not [made] public. In other cases, such as this one, it is clear that the studios have demonstrated that they are willing to go further.”