Hand-Held Device
For DVD Movies
Raises Legal Issues

By KEVIN J. DELANEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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.

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 on 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 gadget. Using a video compression standard called MPEG-4, the
Archos device is able 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.

--snip--

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107343191287572300,00.html

Ironically, well rather more that the media is misinformed, Archos has been making hand held HD mp3 players a good 2 years before iPod was even a concept. I just hate that everybody credits the iPod as the "brandname" of the HD mp3 players.