Seen and heard last week at Network World's DEMOfall 08 in San Diego:

When RealNetworks took the wraps off new DVD-to-PC copying software, one major selling point was that users now can sleep soundly knowing for the first time that their homemade copies of commercial movies are perfectly legal.

Maybe. The motion picture industry, which doesn't even like to see the words "DVD" and "copying" in the same sentence, said it's not ready to endorse that blanket assurance from RealNetworks, as it had learned of the product only days before. The industry has fought such DVD copying in the past, last year losing a drawn-out courtroom battle with an upstart maker of high-end media servers, a ruling one losing attorney suggested —warned, actually — would "open the floodgates" to the type of inexpensive DVD copying system RealNetworks unveiled. The industry has appealed that court ruling.

Called RealDVD, the $50 application ($30 introductory price) is designed to make digital movie collections more accessible, portable and easier to manage. "Unlike existing consumer applications on the market today, RealDVD is licensed DVD software that saves a secure copy of a DVD to the hard drive without removing or altering the CSS encryption," the company says. RealDVD needs 10 to 40 minutes to copy a flick and eats up 4 to 8 gig per saved movie, so portable storage devices will be required to augment hard drives for users who want to collect more than a handful of movies.

As for that much-ballyhooed promise of legality, the Motion Picture Association of America isn't ready to agree: "We really just became aware of this in the past 24 hours," Elizabeth Kaltman, a spokeswoman for the MPAA, told me. "We have nothing else to say at this time."

I'm betting its lawyers will later.

A bit later in the program, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal fame conducted a panel in which they were to "interview" each other in the same aggressive manner one might expect of these veteran journalists when taking on a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. That didn't happen — they were cupcakes toward each other — but they had plenty of interesting things to say, including this rather ominous warning from Mossberg concerning the future of 3G phones and the increasingly heavy-duty computing they are enabling: