According to the Korea Times, five US film studios have sued Samsung over a glitch in their DVD players, allowing users to sidestep both region encoding and HDCP.
Samsung Electronics, Asia's most valuable high-tech company, is scrambling after multiple U.S. movie studios reportedly took the Seoul-based firm to court, alleging glitches in its DVD players.
Over the weekend, Bloomberg news reported Walt Disney, Time Warner and three other major film makers filed the lawsuit against Samsung in U.S. court.
They claimed that Samsung's DVD players allowed consumers to avoid encryption features that prevent unauthorized duplication and demanded a recall of all the problematic products, Bloomberg said.
Samsung believes the DVD player in question is the DVD-HD841, which was discontinued more than 15 months ago. Of course, the big question then is "why now?". To put it simply, the movie industry is trying to make it clear that they do not want companies producing products that can bypass the protection schemes they've put in place. Most importantly, those that they've worked hard to implement in Blu-ray and HD DVD. Anyway, if you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here.