this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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It's odd to me that there are places that would consider that piracy
In my country (the Netherlands), to my knowledge, you have the right to do whatever you like with your copy of a movie as long as you don't distribute it.
That includes ripping it, and putting the mkv on your personal server. That is precisely what the home-copy tax is for afterall..
There doesn't seem to be a common consensus on whether it is in the US. Some people say it's fine as long as you paid for the disc. Others say the act of breaking DRM and producing a copy is a crime in itself.
In the US, my understanding is that there's a weird catch-22 where it's legal to make digital copies of media you own for personal use thanks to Fair Use laws, but it's illegal to break copy protection under DMCA law. So you end up unable to exercise your right to copy DVDs and Blu-ray discs because they have copy protection, but it's perfectly legal to copy music CDs for personal use because they don't have copy protection.
Personally, I find it extremely unlikely you'll get jailed or fined for ripping your discs for personal use. It's only if you start redistributing it that you increase your likelihood of legal problems.
Technically, you could dump the disc as an iso, then restore it to a disk later with the encryption intact.
Possibly not the best idea from a future access standpoint, mind!
That's a good point I hadn't considered from a legal standpoint before. I believe there's also some network media players out there that can load up iso files, so in theory you could have a library of iso files that you load up as if you were playing the disc, complete with menus and all.
I have no idea if this is any better from a legal standpoint though, since you'd still be using what I assume is unauthorized software to bypass the DVD and Blu-ray encryption whenever you play the iso.
Long story short, they really need to carve out a DMCA exception for this specific conflicting case (which they've done for other conflicting situations), but I suspect there's some strong lobbying against it by interested parties...