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US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered Real to remove the software until she had reviewed all the documents submitted by both sides in the case brought last week on behalf of the six major movies studios.

The studios argue that the software violates US copyright laws by allowing users to circumvent the CSS DRM on DVD discs to enable them to be copied to a computer.

Real disagrees, stressing that its software at no stages attempts to circumvent CSS except when it needs to play a disc - which is what all DVD players necessarily do and which is permitted by the DVD licence.

Instead, when copying a disc, RealDVD preserves CSS and adds another layer of DRM itself, which Real claims is even more secure. Real even asked anti-DRM expert Ed Felten to <

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analyse the software and explain that this is the case.

“RealDVD does not circumvent the CSS technology, but instead uses the CSS authentication and decryption algorithms, and the associated keys, as they were specified to be used,” Felten says. “RealDVD is a licensed implementation of these algorithms and it uses licensed decryption keys.”

With the CSS preserved added to the AES-128 encryption the software also deploys and, “Video content protected by RealDVD is more secure than the same video content would be on a DVD.”

The studios argue that this is largely irrelevant. RealDVD still enables users to copy discs that they do not own.

The software, they argue in their court filing, will allow users to, “construct large electronic jukeboxes of free, unrecoverable copies … assembled from DVDs rented at a fraction of the purchase price or simply borrowed for free.”

The upshot, they say, will deal, “a potentially fatal blow to the efforts of the studios and their partners (including iTunes, Amazon.com and others) to offer legitimate ways to provide digital copies of DVD content to consumers.”

The case continues.