321 Studios was a

privately held company A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

headquartered in

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

Missouri Missouri is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it is bordered by eight states (tied for the most with Tennessee ...

with a sales office in

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. The company was a provider of DVD authoring software. In February 2004, after a three-year legal battle with several of the major

Hollywood Hollywood usually refers to: * Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California * Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States Hollywood may also refer to: Places United States * Hollywood District (disambiguation) * Hollywood, ...

studios, the DVDXCopy products which the company sold were deemed by a California court to be in violation of the

Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or s ...

(DMCA) in the case

321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Inc. ''321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Inc.'', 307 F. Supp. 2d 1085 (N.D. Cal. 2004), is a district court case brought by 321 Studios seeking declaratory judgment from the court that their DVD ripping software, i.e. DVD Copy Plus and DVD X ...

and were banned from selling DVD

Content Scrambling System The Content Scramble System (CSS) is a digital rights management (DRM) and encryption system employed on many commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm. The system was introduced around 1996 ...

circumvention software. The company was shut down in August 2004.

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite journal, title=321 Studios v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc., journal=Berkeley Technology Law Journal, date=January 2005, volume=20, issue=1, page=723, doi=10.15779/Z38VH6T, url=http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1546&context=btlj, access-date=16 November 2016, author1=Berkeley Technology Law Journal

External links

PC Mag article on DVD X Copy

AfterDawn article about 321 Studios' shutdown
DVD companies of the United States DVD rippers Privately held companies based in Missouri Companies disestablished in 2004