hanna975

Thanks everyone who put forth their information they found. I found this and I think this pretty much narrows it down to what myself and others are trying to do.

Know Your Fair Use Rights
While copyright law grants authors the exclusive right to reproduce and profit from their works, the law recognizes an exception called fair use. Fair use permits consumers' limited personal, non-commercial use of lawfully obtained copyrighted material without prior consent of the copyright owner. It allows you to photocopy parts of books you own and make back-up tapes of movies or music you own onto VHS or cassette tapes. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that fair use is necessary to avoid an irreconcilable conflict between copyright law and the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

The artist and companies still made their money off me, what some of them seem to be trying to do, is get everyone to buy more than one copy so they can make more money. Sorry corporate america, I buy things once and thats it. If I break it and it's my fault, then I'll buy it again. You have enough of my money.

BigD, I know you've been quiet about all this, but let me say thanks. Your tutorials are a great help. That last setting you gave works great.

reese

Quote:

Originally posted by wmcjhi My advice is to cut this discussion before you get in trouble. Simply putting the DVD on your harddrive is illegal in most cases, making discussion of this quite illegal and bad for aximsite if someone saw it who cared...

Putting a dvd on your HD is 100% legal assuming you own the dvd. Backups are always allowed, so i have no clue what you mean. Also, i could stand here and say all day "I use DVDxCopy Xpress to copy DVD's all day long!!!" With just that sentence, i hav ebroken no laws, nor spoke of anything illegal.

wifi_thinking

we should have a software thread for sure - I didn't know about dvd shrink!

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reese

Dr. Divx does an even better job. There is a trial online, which asks for a reg code after a few weeks ;-) All you do is pick the DVD, where you want it to go, and the resolution, and viola! instant Divx rip, top quality.

sracer

Quote:

Originally posted by reese Putting a dvd on your HD is 100% legal assuming you own the dvd. Backups are always allowed, so i have no clue what you mean. Also, i could stand here and say all day "I use DVDxCopy Xpress to copy DVD's all day long!!!" With just that sentence, i hav ebroken no laws, nor spoke of anything illegal.

Not true... simply not true. "Fair Use" is superceded by the DMCA. If you have a DVD that is NOT encrypted (CSS), then and only then can you back it up.

In the long chain of actions required to convert a DVD to a wmv/divx/mpg file, the ONLY step that is illegal (under the DMCA) is the process of decrypting the DVD contents. This is why applications like "InstantCopy" will read a VOB from a harddrive, but not from the DVD itself.

sracer

Quote:

Originally posted by wifi_thinking we should have a software thread for sure - I didn't know about dvd shrink!

No we shouldn't... there's way too much software available to have a thread here... there's numerous sites devoted to this stuff. My favorite is dvdrhelp.com (now called videohelp.com)

wmcjhi

Quote:

Originally posted by hanna975 I'm going to start by saying I'm not going to get into a huge debate about who's right and who's wrong on this like other topics I've seen in here(wifi-if you didn't pay for it, it's not yours). My original post says this is "my" DVD collection that "I" wish to watch on "my" computers. I'm not trying to share or give or sell or anything like that. I just wish to enjoy what I "pay" for the way I want to. I understand the whole illegal downloading of music and movies and the anything of the sort. This isn't what I'm doing and this isn't what I'm going to do. If it's illegal to make copies of what I paid for for my personal use, and I stress "my personal use", please include a link to where it is proven and documented illegal and I will end it there. I'm sorry if this sounds a little harsh, but I'm fed up with all these companies out there who take my hard earned money when I buy something and then tell me I'm not allowed to use it or enjoy it the way I want to. I pay my money for what I have and the artist get their share and the companies also get the share. They can go after the people who downloaded(steal) it for free or offer for free but leave the people alone who put the money in their pockets. It has never paid off to bite the hands that feed. And the customers feed them.

I sympathize with you and totally agree, but the law is the law and Chris won't be able to say, "well that law isn't fair" if he gets in trouble. I'll try to find a link, but the fact is that, even if you own the DVD and it is being copied for backup purposes, breaking the macrovision copy protection (which you have to do to copy the disk) is illegal. End of story. I know it sucks, but that's just how it is. Again, I agree with you, but I'm just looking out for the best interest of aximsite.

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nelj_25

maybe in the future things will be more clear:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/0...eut/index.html

nelj

wmcjhi

^^Good article...however, it is referring to future DVD technology releases...currently:

Quote:

Current DVDs are protected by a system called CSS, for content scrambling system, which prevents copying. The computer and consumer electronics industries have pushed to allow less-encumbered sharing of media between TVs, computers, and portable players

^You break that protection, you breka the law...and you have to break it to "backup" the dvd.

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nelj_25

yeah, wmcjhi, I understand about the CSS and decryption.

But, hopefully, the media companies will get a future strategy together to allow us to "legally" put movies on pdas. If so, I see no reason why they wouldn't allow the same rights to older CSS technology DVDs.

interesting topic! that's for sure.
nelj

wmcjhi

^^Hopefully, but doubtful.

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sracer

Quote:

Originally posted by wmcjhi I sympathize with you and totally agree, but the law is the law and Chris won't be able to say, "well that law isn't fair" if he gets in trouble. I'll try to find a link, but the fact is that, even if you own the DVD and it is being copied for backup purposes, breaking the macrovision copy protection (which you have to do to copy the disk) is illegal. End of story. I know it sucks, but that's just how it is. Again, I agree with you, but I'm just looking out for the best interest of aximsite.

Not exactly. It isn't breaking Macrovision that is illegal... but breaking the CSS encryption.

There is a completely legal way to convert your DVDs for playback on PCs. If you have a TV tuner/Video capture card, you can connect a DVD player to it and use your PVR software to record it on your PC. Of course the quality won't be as high as a digital rip, but it is completely legal.

wmcjhi

^^Right, but it is essentially legal because you are losing quality.

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hanna975

When I first started this thread, it was just a simple question. I didn't expect this. Especially reading that damn DMCA.

Everybody has made some very valid points.

One point is you can't crack their code, another is Fair Use.
Depending on interpretation, they counter each other. This can and does leave this very open to debate. Hense this thread.

I've only heard of the movie companies going after one program, but in the end, the program is still available with minor changes. Has anyone heard about them going after individuals(not counting people who downloaded from or put on P2P networks) for making personal copies. Include a link if possible.

In the end, after all this discussion, I'm on the edge. I'm not completly convinced yet it's illegal, but stand by my right of Fair Use.

A note to everyone, thanks for keeping this thread civil. I know I was a little vocal. It's just these companies get my goat. Any anger interpretted in my posts is directed towards them. Not anyone here. I see everyone here as being like me, a hard working Joe/Joan trying to get through life with the fewest bumps in the road.

AMike

Just think of how those researchers felt when the company brought the full weight of their legal teams upon them. One fellow even got sued for telling people to hit the "shift" key to prevent the auto-installation of some copy protection software on CDs. I've never heard of them going after an individual that just does things for personal use- how would they know if you don't post movies for others? Furthermore, companies' claims would likely seem specious at best in the courts. Luckily, it's still illegal (for now) for companies to spy on us so they can't really know once you bring the DVD home.

The debate is actually raging over fair use v. DMCA in the courts. DMCA clearly makes the circumvention of copywrite mechanisms illegal, but like you mentioned, this is in violation of a long standing tradition of fair use. It should be interesting to see how it plays out in a couple of years. If you really feel strongly about this, write your congresspeople.