Samsung sued by big movie studios over DVD-HD841

Continuing in a Digital Millenium vein: hardware giant Samsung is being sued by a collection of big movie studios: 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Time Warner, Walt Disney, and Universal. The movie moguls seem to think they have a shot to gouge a mountain of cash from the Korean giant to 'compensate' them for revenues lost due to copied DVDs played on a Samsung device, that by some train of dubious logic they translate into lost sales.

The Korean Times said Samsung had not officially received the complaint as yet. However, a Samsung representative said:

In fact, we do not exactly know the contents of the lawsuit and the intention of the plaintiffs. We have yet to receive the complaint,

However, he speculated that the studios took issue with the DVD-HD841, which Samsung sold in the US between June and October 2004.

If so, I do not know why the movie studios are complaining about the products, of which production was brought to an end more than 15 months ago. We stopped manufacturing the model after concerns erupted that its copy-protection features can be circumvented by sophisticated users.

It may come as a shock to the movie studios, but there aren't many DVD player out there that can't be used to play copied disks created by 'sophisticated users'.

I wonder if that will be Samsung's defence? Was their machine significantly more vulnerable than any other. If it was, how many losts sales is the errant Samsung player responsible for? It must be literally hundreds?

If so, the value of lost sales will amount to a sum so insignificant when compared to the legal bills likely to be involved in this case that if the damages were to actually be realistic, Samsung could pay them out of the petty-cash box they use to buy cakes when a staff member has a birthday in their US marketing department.

Obviously, the damages would have to substantially magnified to justify the legal fees, and it's likely that only the lawyers will be the winners in this one.