In a ruling that can best be described as bizarre, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel, the Judge hearing the MPAA case against RealDVD, set a legal precedent when she ordered the courtroom to be sealed on the basis that confidential information about DVD encryption technology must not be disclosed to the public and the press. Generally, courtroom hearings are rarely sealed due to freedom of the press and freedom of public information.

The motion to seal was sought by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the group that represents the six largest film studios, after it filed an action against RealDVD software for allegedly violating the Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DCMA); the MPAA claims that RealDVD violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because it bypasses the copy protection built into DVDs. The DMCA was enacted to prohibit companies from developing products that circumvent anti-piracy protections. Real Networks has denied that the encryption technology is cracked by RealDVD because its technology merely allows licensed users to copy and store DVDs onto a hard drive and that this does not violate the law.

The studios argument against RealDVD technology is that they claim it will enable people to "rent, rip, and return" DVDs. These are the terms used when a consumer rents a DVD, copies the content onto a hard drive, and returns the DVD without paying for the official authorized copy. RealDVD claims that consumers have the right to make personal copies of their DVDs and that there is other technology available that does basically what RealDVDs does, and the MPAA has not gone after those other technology companies. The MPAA counters that consumers don't own the right to crack the encryption code to make copies of DVDs. Critics of the MPAA's case against Real allege the real intention of the film industry is instead to try to retain absolute control over who builds devices that play DVDs.

In her ruling, Judge Patel issued a statement that said, "I find that this does meet the requirements for a trade secret. We're going to protect what needs to be protected. I'm ordering everyone not signed off on a confidentiality agreement to leave the courtroom."