
Originally Posted by
Beirut
(Lemur, I can't find whether ripping DVDs in the manner you suggest is legal or not, so to err on the side of caution, I've deleted that part of your post. Feel free to correct me if you have the info - Beirut)
At the moment, what I'm doing for my kids is legal in the U.S.A. You are allowed to make backups of DVDs you own, to use in a manner you see fit. So when I rip Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo to Xvid for convenient playback, I'm in the clear.
However, in time this may become verboten:
A proposed amendment to the current copy protection license governing DVDs would completely ban all DVD backups, and prevent DVD playback without the DVD disk being present inside the drive.
The proposed amendment was made public in a letter sent by Michael Malcolm, the chief executive of Kaleidescape, a DVD jukebox company which successfully defeated a suit by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) this past March. The proposed amendment is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, according to Malcolm.
Hmm, doing a little more digging, it appears that U.S. law contradicts itself on this issue. Fair Use indicates that we, as consumers, have a right to backup legally owned media. The DMCA, however, makes it a crime to break the encryption on a DVD. So if I'm reading this right, I am okay having a backup of Spirited Away, but I break the law by decrypting the disk. Freaky.
The ability to create copies of the media you've purchased for personal use is a long-accepted facet of the fair-use doctrine in U.S. copyright law (at least, it used to be). However, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) states that it's illegal to break the CSS copy-protection mechanism employed by most commercial DVD movies. What does that mean? Most fair-use advocates say that the policy directly contradicts U.S. copyright law, but the DMCA seems to indicate that you cannot make a copy of a commercial DVD, even for personal use, and you certainly cannot give a copied DVD to anyone or watch copied DVD files on your computer. We assume that fair use will eventually catch up and be established as a safety valve for consumers (which has been the pattern with previous technologies, such as VHS), but for now, the territory is still uncertain and a bit dangerous.
The new motto for intellectual property law in the U.S.A. should be Walt Whitman's: "Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I am large, and contain multitudes."
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