Yes, I know the DMCA forbids the circumvention of the copy protection of a DVD. In fact, the position of the movie industry in the US is that if you want a backup copy of your DVD, you should buy it. This is utter hogwash. It is a right, not a privilege, for consumers to protect their investment in anything they have legally purchased. Making a backup copy of a DVD for personal use is an act in protecting your investment. I do it all the time.

There are free software products that allow you to copy a DVD from your computer's DVD player to the hard drive, removing all forms of copy protection. There are free and commercial software products that allow you to copy that DVD to a blank DVD. Some will even allow you to compress/convert the movie to a format that will fit on a blank CD. There are numerous guides at VideoHelp.com to help you get the right software for your media and hardware.

I use DVD Decryptor to rip my movies. Since it's no longer updated to keep up with the industry's continued shenanigans, I use DVDFabDecryptor on titles that produce errors with DVD Decryptor. For an exact copy (or almost exact copy), I use Pinnacle InstantCopy (a commercial title no longer being sold) to copy a movie from my hard drive to a blank DVD. I use this particular product primarily because it compresses dual-layer-sized movies to fit on single-layer blanks with little loss of quality. A lot of the older movies don't even require compression. I'm sure there are other products that work just as well, if not better.

Most of the time, I don't need exact or near-exact copies. Since I watch my movies on my notebook PC, coupled with the fact that I don't want to spend more than I absolutely have to because of my fixed income, I convert my movies to DivX/XviD compatible files (.avi) and store them on blank media. I use a free software suite called "Auto Gordian Knot" to compress/encode the movies on my hard drive. Even though I prefer to put one movie on one CD, it doesn't make sense when it's more economical to put 4 to 6 movies on a blank DVD. A blank CD here costs about 20 cents in US dollars while a blank DVD costs about 50 cents in US dollars. If a blank DVD can hold 5 movies, it costs me one fourth the price to store the same amount of files as 5 blank compact disks.

I have seen DVD players being sold here for a mere $40.00 in US dollars that are DivX/XviD compatible. In a few short months, I'll be buying one. I'll be testing players with one of my disks to make sure the .avi files play on the DVD player I want to buy before I buy it, right there in the store. I would probably have a problem doing that in most stores in the US, but it's commonplace to see it done here.

So, am I breaking the law by ripping the DVD movies in the first place? You bet I am. After losing many DVD movies due to abuse and other forms of damage, I'm protecting my investment. The originals are safely put away. If I lend a movie to someone, it's a copy. If it gets destroyed, I make another copy. A fifty cent loss is much more acceptable to me than the loss of the original movie.

The DMCA is a ridiculous attempt to take away rights from consumers and fill the coffers of the movie industry executives. It is our civic duty to violate this provision of the law as much as we can. Only through mass civil disobedience will the law ever get changed. The movie industry uses piracy prevention as its excuse for the rigidity of the law. This is the lie they want us to believe. Greed, and only greed, is the sole reason for the law.

Many people are going to react to my words with the wrong attitude. These people believe that we should obey the law because entertainment is a privilege that we have to pay for. What they fail to understand is that the privilege portion ends when the media is sold. After that, the property belongs to the buyer. How would you like it if you were suddenly told that you had to return a DVD to the store, without a refund, because you have no rights concerning the DVD? I thought so.