“Hollywood calls it ‘rent, rip and return’ and contends it’s one of the biggest technological threats to the movie industry’s annual US$20 billion DVD market – software that allows you to copy a film without paying for it,” The Associated Press reports.

“On Friday, the showdown over the issue will take place in federal court in San Francisco, where an army of lawyers representing Hollywood will argue that RealNetworks’s DVD ‘ripper’ is an illegal digital piracy tool,” AP reports. “The company, in turn, will say the US$29.99 software that allows DVDs to be easily copied to computer hard drives is legitimate.”

“The same federal judge who shut down music-swapping site Napster in 2000 because of copyright violations will preside over the three-day trial, which is expected to cut to the heart of the same technological upheaval roiling Hollywood that forever changed the face of the music business,” AP reports.

“The movie studios fear that if RealNetworks is allowed to sell its RealDVD software, consumers will quickly lose interest in paying retail for DVDs that can be rented cheaply, copied and returned,” AP reports. “Their lawyers argue the software violates a federal law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes software and other tools that enable digital piracy illegal.”

AP reports, “For its part, the Seattle-based company says its RealDVD product is designed to simply let customers back up a purchased DVD and that the software allows for only one copy to be made.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Plug one leak; several more open up. In fact, several more are already open and they’re not as easily sued (open source, offshore, etc.) Hollywood would do better to sell their product sans DRM, freely-transferrable to multiple devices, at reasonable prices.