I have a new Panasonic DMR-EZ48V and am trying to copy family DV's taken with a Sony MiniDV camcorder to a DVD-R blank disk and cannot. I get the error message: "Recording has stopped. Copyrighted material cannot be copied." I've also switched disks to a DVD-RW with the same result. I've also trying playing other DV tapes. The material is obviously not copyrighted. I haven't tried a DVD+R disk, but don't imagine it would have an effect. The unit works fine, otherwise, having copied a number of old VHS tapes to DVD-R disks. Any help?

Cameras can be glitchy at times, also your Panasonic recorder may simply just not get along with your Sony camera (the Panasonic EZ models have some bugs). The first thing you can try is to switch connections: if you've been using a FireWire/DV cbale to connect the two units, try using the analog cable that should have come with the camera (it ends in 3 plugs for the recorder: video, audio L and audio R). Or if you've been using the analog try the DV instead. If both result in a copyright shutdown, about all you can do buy a filter to connect between the two units to correct this false "copy prohibit" signal. Just run a search on AVS for "cp filter" and you will get a lot of info.

Thanks. I'll try switching cables. I do have the camera cable with RCA and S-Video. Will I take a video quality hit going from DV to S-Video or will it get swallowed up in the conversion to MPEG anyway?

Tried the cameras analog cable with the S-video connector and it appears to be working. Thanks. Will I take a video quality hit or will it matter since the MPEG conversion will slam the quality anyway?

The results should be approximately equal. In either case there is some transcoding and quality reduction going on: the recorder DV input has to downsample the cameras DVI stream to MPEG2, which depending on the recorder design can sometimes be worse then the internal camera conversion to S-video followed by the recorders primary MPEG2 encoder. Many recorders do not even convert DV camera input digitally: they perform an on-the-fly D/A-A/D conversion. So you may not notice much difference in the final DVD copy.