[OT] legality of DVD backup

[David Bovill]

In most countries this is what you would call legally defensible under faire
use or the equivalent in your jurisdiction. There is no case I know of where
someone has been prosecuted for copyright infringement by making a backup
copy for personal use, given that they own a legal copy in another medium.
However there is nothing to stop a copyright holder taking you to court, in
which case it would be down to you to make a faire use or equivalent defence
- and you could then have the privilege of being (as far as I know), the
first person to loose such a case :)

In the real world, you are extremely unlikely to be taken to court over this
issue, as the industry has plenty to do taking clear cut cases of
downloading pirated DVD's to court, and the last thing they want is to loose
a faire use case and so set a precedent.

A related issue is the obtaining and use of the software to actually do the
decryption (which is why it can be hard to get a copy from a mainstream site
- as Macrovision does its best to take action against distributers). A good
account here is taken from the wikipedia
article<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter>
:

Under United States' Federal law, making a backup copy of a
DVD-Video<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video>or an audio
> CD <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_%28audio_CD_standard%29> by a
> consumer is legal under fair use <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use>protection. However, this provision of United States law conflicts with the Digital
> Millennium Copyright Act<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act>prohibition of so-called "circumvention measures" of copy
> protections <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection>.
>
> In the noted "321" case, Federal District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern
> District of California<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Northern_District_of_California>
> ,[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter#cite_note-4> ruled that
> the backup copies made with software such as DVD Decrypter are in fact legal
> but that distribution of the software used to make them is illegal. As of
> the date of this revision, neither the US Supreme Court<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Supreme_Court>nor the US
> Congress <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Congress> has taken definitive
> action on the matter.
>
As ever - non of the above is legal advice, and I am not a lawyer.

On 8 November 2010 18:40, stephen barncard
<stephenREVOLUTION2 at barncard.com>wrote:

> What you described is 'fair use' in the US. It means 'backup copy for
> personal use'.
>