More than two years ago, a judge in Santa Clara County, Calif., ruled that Kaleidescape could sell a line of media servers that allowed ripping a DVD to a hard drive. In June, a state appellate court heard an appeal brought by the DVD Copy Control Association, a plaintiff in both the case against Kaleidescape and RealNetworks.

Both cases concern fundamentally the same technology and arguments: whether both companies have the right to manufacture a product that rips DVDs to a hard drive, and if that capability violated the DVD CCA's contract or some other copyright law.

In 2008, RealNetworks attempted to sell a product known as RealDVD, software which rips a DVD to a PC's hard drive. A federal court blocked RealDVD's sale, even as Real hoped to launch a DVD-ripping set-top box, known as Facet, by the 2009 holiday season. The development of the Facet product went forward, Real executives testified, because of the legal protections they believed Kaleidescape's product provided.

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"Kaleidescape really was the blueprint for us to enter that market," Rob Glaser, the chief executive of RealNetworks, testified at trial, characterizing Kaleidescape's server as a "Porsche," a "beautiful" product that Real set out to undercut on price.

Now, the confluence of the two rulings presents a chicken-and-egg problem for both courts, as one ruling will directly affect the other. A reversal by the California appellate court would directly affect the federal RealNetworks case, especially if the state ruling were to be delivered first. Upholding the Kaleidescape ruling will likely mean an appeal to the California Supreme Court, observers said, but it might also persuade Judge Marilyn Hall Patel to lift her injunction and permit RealDVD to be sold into the marketplace.

Representatives for the DVD-CCA and RealNetworks declined to comment for this story. Kaleidescape representatives did not return repeated requests for comment.

In 2007, the DVD-CCA originally sued Kaleidescape for breach of the DVD-CCA's licensing contract governing CSS, specifically arguing that the Kaleidescape server failed to prevent digital copying, did not require a disc to be in the drive during playback, and violated specifications governing the Content Scrambling System (CSS), which protects DVDs. But on March 30, 2007, Judge Leslie C. Nichols of the Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose found for Kaleidescape. Next: What Doomed the DVD CCA