[Illbay]

"I'd like an argument, please."

[Wingy]

Not an arguement, but an observation. If this software is USED AS INTENDED, then I see no harm, no foul...But, how does anyone know how it will be used by the consumer? I might set up a little operation to copy and sell "Star Wars" for $5.00. with none of the production costs, I should be able to reap a tidy profit when the costs of raw disks come down to $.30. Is that fair?

Now if I was only using it to backup my own purchased movie/software, I would say that it is fair.

The question, it seems to me, comes down to how it is used by the public.

You're the lawyer, what do you and the courts think?

[Renegade]

Copying a DVD over the internet from someone who PURCHASED the original, is no different than making a copy of a vinyl record, cassette tape, or CD that you bought and giving it to a friend .

[drjoe]

There is a product, DVD Backup, for OSX on the Macintosh ostensibly for making backup copies of purchased DVDs. I suppose that we can now look forward to the movie-copying-police joining the ranks of the drug police, alcohol police, seat-belt police, dirty picture police, gun trigger lock police and our own homegrown Loudoun County VA pie police.

[neutrino]

So 321 has moved to allay some of industry's concerns. DVD X Copy injects electronic barriers into the copies it makes to keep them from being duplicated further.

It looks as if 321 Studios is being quite reasonable. The movie industry should welcome them with open arms - because, frankly, one can find explicit instructions on the internet about how to do this anyway. And with the internet instructions I just mentioned, there are NO protections for copyright.

[wewillnotfail]

We moved all our home movies onto VHS tapes. Now we'd like to move them onto DVD. What's the best/cheapest way to do this.

[B Knotts]

Please note that this is not actually about "copy protection." You can copy a DVD to another DVD until the cows come home. What this is about is access control, which prevents someone from accessing the DVD in unapproved ways.

What this is really about is that Hollyweird was dissatisfied with Sony vs. Universal Studios and other court decisions that allowed consumers some Fair Use rights. They have sought to implement a technological barrier to Fair Use. That is what DMCA is all about. It seeks to outlaw the rights that courts have said consumers have, which would seem to me to be unconstitional on its face.

[SlightOfTongue]

Whether it is legal or not, or a good idea, if you are going to opt for the software, stay away from DVDtoCD.com. They tried ripping me off. When I paid for a download of the their software, they never sent me to a page or URL to download, just back to the order page.

iBill.com, the payment center, did refund the money on my Visa account after a few weeks of complaining.

[Jimbaugh]

The end of Hollywood. There are allready DVD Rippers on the net and every DVD you copy denies the Hollywood left money to support the Democrats.

[Grig]

CSS is NOT a copy protection technology. DVD standards and technology were created by a group of companies, and every manufacturer of DVD players has to pay them money for a license to make DVD players. CSS is how they enforce their fee, the manufactuerers have to conform to their specs and pay the fee to get the decryption key for CSS to make playing the DVD possible. It also has the side effect of not allowing a person to copy the .vob files to a hard drive and playing the movie from the hard drive (the player software realizes it's from a hard drive and refuses to play it)

Because NOBODY was making dvd player software for Linux systems, CSS was cracked by some guys who decided to make their own Linux DVD playing software. deCSS was the first crack and since then others have been made.

There is no need to remove or crack CSS if making a duplicate of a DVD, because the CSS is duplicated by the same process and in the end you have a perfect copy that will still play on any dvd player that was properly licensed. Macrovision prevents DVD to VHS taping (but there are ways around that) and Region Coding stops people in Europe from getting a playable DVD from the USA of movies that haven't yet opened over there (and there are ways around that too)

If a person wants to make a VCD copy of a DVD, they can do that if they have large hard drive and a regular CD burner and the right software (which is free), but VCD's are similar in quality to VHS.

I tend to back up everything I can since my kids are very, very good at abusing my CD's.

[scouse]

Phillips has a new product that they advertise on TV all the time. It is called a DVD Recorder. From what I can ascertain you can make DVDs from VHS tapes. What is to stop anyone from copying a DVD onto a tape then using this machine to re-reord it onto a DVD blank?

[Grig]

I just checked 321 Studio's website http://www.copymydvd.com/index.htm?a=30427 and clearly this is a program to copy a DVD to a VCD. There is freeware that can do that.