Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal • Hacker News Board

Post by mnutt » Fri, Nov 26, 2010, 7:29 AM UTC

jerf wrote: post #32

gregschlom wrote: post #7

I'm curious to see wich kind of legal weapon the movie companies are going to use to fight this one. I expect something like forbid playing rental dvds on players more than 10 feet away from the TV... This is going to be sick.

Oh, that's easy. This company claims that the user is the only thing legally involved, and they have merely provided tools which the user is using to watch DVDs that happen to be physically located elsewhere. Therefore they are entirely uninvolved and therefore can't be said to be in violation of anything, indeed, they shouldn't even be a party to the suit; if the movie companies want to sue anyone, they will claim,…

Unfortunately I think you're right that there will probably be a ruling that just shuts them down. Having worked for a company that was sued by large media companies and lost, I can say that while the suit was extremely complicated, the individual details were mostly glossed over as irrelevant. (for instance, the difference between a website and desktop software) The court knew where it wanted to end up, and wasn't all that concerned about how it got there.

As hackers, we'd like to think of the legal system as a big piece of software that responds consistently to commands, but for better or worse it isn't.