San Francisco - RealNetworks said Monday that it had stopped distribution of a software program to rip off DVDs, in compliance with a temporary injunction issued Friday by a federal court in California.

The injunction was issued in response to a lawsuit by the Motion Pictures Association of America which alleged that the program, RealDVD, circumvented laws against illegal DVD copying. The organization of Hollywood studios fears that if the software becomes widely available it would harm sales of DVDs and online movie downloads in the same way that music-copying software hastened the demise of CD sales.

"Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable," said RealNetworks on its website. "Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use."

The RealDVD software claims to be a legal means of copying DVDs that a user already owns to a hard drive and includes strong encryption to prevent the files from being burned to a new DVD or traded over the internet.