A group of individuals have filed a class-action suit against ATI Technologies for not supporting high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP) technology amid claiming “HDCP ready” products.

A filing made by Stanley Batsalkin and Kenny Vargas on behalf of themselves and others in a San Jose district court alleges ATI Technologies, ATI Technologies Systems, ATI Research Silicon Valley, ATI Research breached state consumer protection statutes, express warranty statures, implied warranty statutes, negligent misrepresentation common laws and unjust enrichment common laws, The Inquirer web-site reported.

In order to track-down the piracy, movie studios vowed to implement HDCP onto content distributed using the Blu-ray and HD DVD media. For consumer electronics the situation is relatively simple: BD and HD DVD players support appropriate connectors by default and high-resolution TVs in their majority also feature necessary technologies. But given that the vast majority of computer graphics cards and current monitors do not support this features, playback of encrypted content will not be possible.

Typically, the playback of HDCP content should include an HDCP transmitter (computer or player), a digital interface (DVI or HDMI) and an HDCP receiver (a display or a TV-set). The content is encrypted at the transmitter and the signal is transmitted to the HDCP receiver a special bus where it is decrypted before viewing. Both the transmitter and the receiver should comply with the standard, which means that computer users will need a BD or HD DVD drive, an appropriate graphics card and a monitor that support HDCP.

Graphics processors from ATI Technologies and Nvidia Corp. have supported HDCP technology since 2003, but in order to be able to output encrypted content to an appropriate monitor, graphics cards should carry a special chip with HDCP keys, something, which not all the graphics cards based on the Radeon chips have. Since ATI advertised its chips as HDCP ready or HDCP compliant, the plaintiffs said that these “representations were false and the cards cannot transmit content pursuant to the HDCP specification”.

The demands of the plaintiffs are unclear, however, they said they would not buy the graphics cards if they knew HDCP was not supported.