Kaleidescape CEO 'Shocked' at Extreme Injunction Against Movie Servers
By Julie Jacobson
DVD CCA surprises Kaleidescape with severe injunction order, CEO Michael Malcolm tells CE Pro. He believes stay will be granted until appeal is exhausted.

Kaleidescape CEO Michael Malcolm and his team was “pretty shocked” by the injunction order just issued against the company in its seven-year-old lawsuit with the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA).

Judge William J. Monahan of the Superior Court of California, Santa Clara, published the injunction last week.



The DVD CCA, which licenses the Content Scramble System (CSS) copy-protection scheme for DVD players, has enjoined Kaleidescape from selling its flagship DVD movie servers because they do not require a physical disc to be present at playback – a requirement of the CSS licensing agreement, according to the DVD CCA and the courts.

After the DVD CCA prevailed in a temporary judgment issued by Monahan in January, Kaleidescape expected an injunction order, but did not expect it to be so severe, said Malcolm in an interview with CE Pro.

All indications from the court trial (no jury) were that Kaleidescape would be required to come into compliance with the CSS licensing agreement -- if the court determined it was not in compliance to begin with -- not eliminate the product category altogether, according to Malcolm, who has maintained all along that Kaleidescape DVD servers do comply with the agreement.

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