[mythtv-users] DVD Ripping was: Zap2it Labs Shutting Down?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Wed Jun 20 12:11:18 UTC 2007


William Munson wrote:

> I never did understand the logic in ripping DVDs. After all I can rent 
> one for $1/day and have yet to see one that I wanted to watch twice. If 
> your kid cant get enough of Barney or whatever, buy the darn thing and 
> support the industry.

A lot of folks do just that, then find their child or pet has chewed up
the disk. Copying or ripping a paid-for disk is considered by most
"normal" people to be a reasonable protection against such things.

Archive or backup constitutes "fair use", as far as the copyright laws
are concerned, so such a thing was at one time perfectly legal in the USA.

But the H'Wood types WANTED you to have to purchase another disk when
your first one was destroyed. They saw it as a "revenue stream". So they
lobbied for the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act", making it illegal to
bypass the CSS system in order to make a backup of a "protected" DVD.

This was NOT an accidental result of a badly-written law. Attempts have
been made to get an exception to the DMCA for archive and backup
purposes, and they have failed. Hollywood got precisely what it wanted.

In addition to backups, a lot of Myth users want to rip a DVD simply for
convenience. They can then play it from the Myth interface without
having to find the disk, load it into a player, perhaps switch sources
on a TV set etc. It also might get rid of one more piece of ugly
electronics in the living room, and perhaps eliminate young children
handling disks.

Most people do not perceive that they are "pirates" by ripping or
copying a DVD, after all, they have paid for it, but the fact is that,
in the USA, it is in fact illegal, and perceived as such by the
copyright owners, the infamous "Hollywood Types".

Years of posts about how to reduce or eliminate what is perceived as a
revenue stream will of course upset certain parties. If they can't fight
the threat directly, but can identify an "Achilles Heel" of the systems
involved, and exert influence to attack that, don't you think they would
do so? They have certainly been proven to have done much worse in the
past. Remember, these are the folks who wanted a teenager thrown into
prison and bankrupted for life for bypassing their CSS system.

Whenever you see something in this world that does not seem to make
sense, it is generally a result of failing to see things from the other
parties perspective. To the West Coast Types DVD ripping equals loss of
revenue, it's as simple as that.

BEWW


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