DVD similarities In early September of 2008, RealNetworks announced DVD RipperRealDVD (originally code-named 'Vegas'), after having previously obtained a CSS (Content Scramble System) license from the DVD Copy Control Association. RealDVD enabled no-disc playback of DVDs on Windows systems, but it wasn't a DVD Ripper per se. In fact, according to RealNetworks it didn't circumvent the CSS encryption algorithm at all; instead it built a second layer of encryption on top of CSS that allowed for playback of the DVD image (which itself could not be copied) on a maximum of five computers running RealDVD.

RealDVD was onerous enough in and of itself to the movie studios, notably because it didn't (more accurately couldn't) differentiate between purchased and rented DVDs, and because then-CEO Rob Glaser subsequently had the gall to put the onus on the studios to solve this problem by changing the encryption algorithm used on rental discs. But what really got the studios' ire was Facet, a Linux-based hardware appliance then under development by RealNetworks, whose code the company subsequently hoped to license to CE manufacturers.

Facet copied DVDs to its internal HDD and as such acted as a video jukebox. RealNetworks likely felt it was on safe ground at the time it was developing Facet; after all, conceptually similar albeit much more expensive products from Kaleidescape had been sanctioned by the California Superior Court in March of 2007. Nonetheless, six movie studios sued RealNetworks in late September 2008 (RealNetworks had preemptively filed a request for declaratory judgment shortly beforehand), the same day RealDVD Ripper was available for purchase. The studios convinced the presiding judge to issue a temporary restraining order freezing product sales and shipments, and the case went to trial the following spring.

Several weeks after the trial against it began, RealNetworks filed another lawsuit, this time against the DVD Copy Control Association and all major studios claiming both that they were a price-fixing illegal cartel and that its CSS license allowed it to develop and sell both RealDVD and Facet. Unfortunately, although RealNetworks may have won in the court of public opinion, it lost in the only court that mattered. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who ominously had decided against Napster in a prior 'fair use'-testing case, ruled against the company in mid-August 2009. She determined that regardless of whether or not RealDVD Ripper circumvented the CSS encryption algorithm itself, by virtue of the fact that RealDVD did not employ an optical disc as its playback media, it didn't encompass DVD Ripperthe full range of CSS copy protection mechanisms: