Comments on: Ripping Personally Owned DVDs for iPhone or iPod Viewing: Legal and Technical Perspectives

By: JB

JB — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:14:14 +0000

CSS (Content Scramble System) is just the data encryption and drive authentication mechanism used on DVDs. The problems you ran in to with Wall-E are actually separate and independent methods based on purposely inserting errors into the UDF file system tables or actual physical disc errors during publishing and pressing. This may be what is called ARccOs or Ripguard. In many cases, these ‘protections’ are violations of the DVD specification. (I’ve actually read the official DVD spec). It seems that it shouldn’t be possible to market and sell these discs as “DVD” if they don’t follow the DVD specification. This may also be why these dvds do not play back properly on some DVD hardware. If you look at the back of DVD packaging, you will see a little symbol usually in the bottom right hand corner of the disc case showing a flattened disc with “DVD” over the top, and “Video” underneath. This would seem to indicate that the disc follows the standard. Interestingly, on some Disney discs, you will see that the symbol is slightly different. It says “Disney DVD”, which I would think indicates they are not following the standard- and don’t even claim to be?

By: What is a hackintosh? « Moving at the Speed of Creativity

What is a hackintosh? « Moving at the Speed of Creativity — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:22:16 +0000

[...] yesterday's post, "Ripping Personally Owned DVDs for iPhone or iPod Viewing: Legal and Technical Perspectives," I reflected on the irony that "legality" when it comes to creating backups or compressed versions [...]

By: RustyBadger

RustyBadger — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:26:41 +0000

It’s interesting to see the fight between the two conflicting laws: Copyright Act on one hand, and DMCA on the other. There is no real contest- in a case involving personal use (ie, backing up a legally-owned copy of media for personal use), the Copyright Act will win every time. Unfortunately, the media cartels won in the States by getting the DMCA passed without the politicians catching the Catch-22 in it.

We’re fortunate in Canada, as we still have no restrictions like the DMCA (which gets us a lot of nasty press from the RIAA and MPAA imbiciles), so copying for personal use is not even a grey area- it’s protected in law. Our Copyright Act even specifically gives us the right to copy music we don’t own, for personal use- in return, we pay a 20-cent levy on every blank CD or DVD we purchase (amounting to over $30,000,000 a year in royalties paid to musicians).

Unfortunately, American lobbyists are pushing hard for DMCA-like terms in the ACTA which is being negotiated right now. If those are approved, it will be even harder for individuals to legally format-shift their content.