Yep, if it's a disc that has encryption, you can't own a non-official copy period as someone, somewhere broke it. Not to mention the act of downloading copyrighted material is illegal.

Hmm, I thought only uploading copyrighted material was technically illegal?

You could be right on that one, but I have an inkling the law is different for movies (or that it was changed in general).

I know I've read of fining college students for downloading movies (not for sharing them) in the news, whereas the music legal issues always seemed to be going after people sharing 1,000's of songs.

I certainly do, for those DVDs of mine which are now OOP.

I believe downloading is illegal as well, but I'm sure its a gray area of the law. The problem is the people being sued don't have the money to battle the record industry or movie industry so these laws never actually get tested in a court as everyone has to settle to keep from being bankrupted.

I noticed for instance that iTunes grants you a license to rip your music to it. That makes me wonder if ripping your own unencrypted CDs to MP3 is also considered illegal by at least the recording industry unless you use a program like iTunes that grants you a license.

DRM is one of my favorite bits of nonsense from the past decade. It does nothing to stop the real pirates and bootleggers and mostly punishes honest consumers. Essentially through DRM these companies are driving away the people they need to pay for the stuff that keeps them in business in the first place.

Granted on a format like DVD the DRM is universal to all players and creates no major problems for most consumers. Well, at least until we started wanting to convert our DVDs for portable devices. However, the DRM on encrypted CDs, digital music, ebooks and digital movies is different for every company and will not work on every device out there. This is what causes people to get pissed and break the encryption on things like iTunes music and Microsoft ebooks.

There are "fair use" laws that specifically allow for copying material on CDs. You can use any program you want: if you own it, you are legally allowed to make copies of CDs (for personal use, of course).

The difference with DVDs is that the movie industry convinced judges that circumventing CSS in any way (without a license) violates the DMCA (a law written before CSS encryption existed). The DMCA doesn't explicitly forbit the copying of DVDs, but the subsequent ruling of courts have upheld the idea that a certain section applies to, and thus makes illegal, circumventing CSS without a license.

I personally hope that DVDTalk does not allow discussion of ripping software for any purpose, be it for use on iPod or PSP. While I side with the advocates of "fair use", it is still illegal today. It's a slippery slope and I assume the last thing this place would want is to become afterdawn and have countless threads and howtos on ripping DVDs for "now deemed acceptable" uses.

So did the rules change?

No.. that's from google ads. I'll block it.