this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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In the US, he is still breaking the law ripping discs. It is against the DMCA to circumvent the DRM on the discs. So he is really just pirating by a different means as far as the industry is concerned.
He is far less likely to get caught doing it that way though.
"People's store-bought DVD collections are always copy-protected or DRM-ed. In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which made it illegal to circumvent DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection on DVDs. This means that it's illegal to create a software program that can bypass DVD DRM protection. Another way of saying it is, the moment you crack DRM to rip the DVD, you've violated the DMCA.
However, the DMCA contains an exception for "fair use." This means that you can legally rip a DVD for personal use, as long as you don't violate any of the other copyright laws. What does this mean in practice? You can rip a DVD for your own personal use, but you can't distribute the ripped file to others. You also can't make a copy of the ripped file for someone else.
So, in a nutshell, if you rip DVD's and restrict the copies to your own personal use, you're probably safe."
https://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/is-it-legal-to-rip-dvd.html
Yupes.
Their trickery was to make the distribution of "circunvention software" the illegal part, so that common people would be unable to exercise their fair use "rights".
Per that Law "anybody" can legally exercise their "fair use" rights so long as they have the technical expertise to code themselves the software to do so since per the very same Law nobody can distribute said tools.
So the Law de facto makes it illegal for everybody but a fraction of a percent of people who know how to code that specific kind of thing to rip their own DVDs.
In practice the only way to exercise one's fair use "rights" is if somebody else has broken the Law and distributed a tool to allow those who do not have quite a rare set of expertises and lots of time in their hands to code their own tools, to exercise said "right".
This is one of the slimiest Tech-related Laws ever passed.
My favourite: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
“Probably” being the operative word there. The MPAA could still sue you into third world poverty to prove a point even if you end up winning the case.
The only reasons they would be aware of this to sue you would be if you or someone else told them. The likelihood of that is pretty much nil unless you do something that is illegal (like selling ripped media), in which case they're more likely to just come after you for that.