VidAngel’s would selling DVDs for $20, then buying them back for $19 after being viewed, making it a $1 rentals to its customers. Yet they ran afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) says you can’t remove or circumvent the access-control protections on DVDs and Blu-Rays. VidAngel tried to claim that the Family Home Movie Act of 2005, which allows the use of technology to censor DVDs, protected it.
Sadly for VidAngel the Judge said the Family Movie Act requires that the filtered content comes from an “authorized copy” of the film, and the digital content VidAngel streamed was not an authorized copy. In addition, the judge said that even if VidAngel’s buy/sellback service created a valid ownership interest in the DVD, it would only apply to the physical disk, not the content streamed from VidAngel’s servers to customers. In fact, VidAngel was actually streaming from a master copy of the movie on the server, not the DVD the customer temporarily owned.
VidAngel has to post a $250,000 bond and said it must temporarily stop circumventing copyright protections, copying the copyrighted materials from DVDs and Blu-rays, and stop streaming or transmitting those works over the web or through apps and media streaming devices like Roku and Apple TV.
VidAngel is expected to appeal the court ruling.
Source: TechCrunch
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