Legal Perplexity

Continued from 'Ready….Set….Squint!'….

This DVD ripping that I'm doing….is it legal? Under the terms of the DMCA, I can definitively state that if your purpose in making a CSS-free DVD image is to share it with your friends, or to re-sell duplicates burned onto blank DVD media, the answer is 'no'. The same answer applies if your motivation is to supplement your personal DVD library with copies of movies you've rented from Blockbuster or Netflix.

However, what if all you want to do is make copies of DVDs you've purchased in order to save the originals from the ravages of canines and kids? Or to place-shift your purchased content onto, for example, an iPod's HDD or the Memory Stick PRO Duo of a widescreen PlayStation Portable (which, as I've previously written, is another sweet movie-viewing device)? Are such usages Fair Use exemptions of the DMCA, even though the DMCA makes it difficult-to-impossible to find CSS-circumventing software (at least from domestic servers, that is)?

The legality of such scenarios has not, to the best of my knowledge, yet been tested in the courts. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Home Recording Rights Coalition have strong opinions on the matter, which a perusal of their website materials will reveal. But, if even the slightest potential that the MPAA might someday pound on your front door is too much for you to bear, there's another option; a device such as the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder2 (which I haven't tried, but the reviews I've read have been pretty positive).

Since it records incoming analog video, such as the analog video outputs of a DVD player, it doesn't require CSS circumvention and therefore more squarely fits within the boundaries of Fair Use exemptions (at least until the media industry succeeds in ramming Analog Hole legislation through Congress, that is). And, although the successive digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversions might arguably reduce quality, any degradation will be barely noticeable on portable devices' small screens.

The biggest downside to the analog video recording approach is that encoding is a time-consuming real-time process, but MPEG4 codec developer Mobilygen plans to fix that problem. By, for example, connecting a video transcoding peripheral (containing Mobilygen silicon, of course) to your PC, with a driver stack that inserts itself within the DirectShow chain, you could redirect a DRM-free digital video stream down USB for faster-than-realtime MPEG4 encoding and subsequent file dump either to a tethered iPod or an inserted Memory Stick.