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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.

CSS is NOT a copy protection technology.

In fact, the purpose of CSS is to enable the studios to enforce cartelization (e.g. the use of region coding to allow the fixing of prices at different levels in different markets without being undercut be grey-market imports) and to control use of lawfully purchased products (e.g. the fast-forward lockout to force the viewer to wait through the ads on some DVDs).

If they can lock up the media completely, the next step will be to convert purchased media to pay-per-view (on top of the original purchase price).