PARIS — Hollywood’s bid to control how its movies are copied, stored and
played is being tested by an unlikely source: a former French oil engineer in an
out-of-the-way Paris suburb, Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal reported.
Henri Crohas’s company, Archos SA, makes a small hand-held device, like a
bulky Palm Pilot, that can record and then play back scores of movies, TV shows
and digital photos on its color screen or a TV set. The gadget — which in
effect does to movies what Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod does to music — already
has sold 100,000 units world-wide during the past six months, beating the big
consumer electronics makers to the U.S. market.
Archos’s device, which costs about $500 to $900 depending on the model,
ignores an anticopying code found on a majority of prerecorded DVDs. That means
consumers can plug the Archos device into a DVD player and transfer a movie to
it. Users also can transfer recorded TV programs and digital music files to the
Archos device. The Archos uses a video compression standard called MPEG-4 to
cram as many as 320 hours of video at near-DVD quality onto its hard drive, the
company says — the equivalent of 160 two-hour movies.
A second kind of anticopying protection thwarts users from recording a
playable copy of a DVD movie onto the hard-drive of a personal computer and then
onto the Archos. But videos can be transferred from the Archos to a PC, where
they could be burned onto a DVD or sent over the Internet, though that would
likely violate copyright laws.
The gadgets alone aren’t likely to spawn a Napster-style boom in online film
piracy. Already, scofflaws with a PC equipped with a DVD player and special
software can rip off films and share them over the Internet. And the process is
slow: It takes as long to copy a DVD movie to the Archos device as it does to
watch the movie. Still, Mr. Crohas and his 150-employee team at Archos (
pronounced AR kos) present a fresh headache for Hollywood because they show how
the industry’s campaign to keep control of its films could be challenged by
small players.
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