Can you tape your record to cassette or mp3 for personal use?
VCRs could tape television programming (including pay movie channels) as ruled by the Supreme Court in their Betamax decision in the 1980s.
Yet now you will find it difficult to get an all in one combination DVR.DVD+/-R machine (and some DVR systems will flush programming that you have recorded after a couple of weeks if a signal is present in the programming to do so).
I have the capacity to copy anything to anything and, believe me, I use it frequently.