A film industry group that oversees copy protection technology of movie DVDs has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against 321 Studios Inc., the maker of popular DVD-copying programs.
The suit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is the latest salvo by the DVD Copy Control Association in its larger fight against what the movie industry considers unauthorized use of its content.
The move also reflects the organization’s strategic shift to go after businesses instead of individuals. Last month, the group dropped its trade secret case against San Francisco programmer Andrew Bunner and hundreds of others who helped post on the Internet copies of a code that cracks the movie copy-protection technology known as the Content Scramble System.
The DVD-copying programs let users make backups by defeating the copy protections encoded onto movie discs.
In two other pending lawsuits, the movie industry claims the software facilitates copyright infringement and piracy. In all the cases, 321 denies any wrongdoing.
