New Ruling Confirms Copying DVDs is Illegal - Page 9

Vudu/ultraviolet looked promising until I moved to a projector setup where I could tell the difference between hdx and blu-ray
Of course the difference isn't night and day. But it's there. And the quality varies on a per movie basis. Some encodes are decent

But the deal breaker for me-
Out of sync audio (dark knight)
Lack of disney/marvel support for disc-to-digital

If only the studios could get their act together. But with that said, Ultraviolet is a step in the right direction.

Pathetic. Industry has execs with no clue who pay lawyers and MBAs tons of money to come up with nonsense that shoots them in the foot in the long run.

The arguments to 'justify' the decision seem spacious.... at best.

Frankly, the rather strong industry keeps harassing rather largest group of consumers in the world with what I would call... the most ridiculous laws and there is no proper consumer defense organization to fight this oxymoronic stupidity. The impotent industry is pushing the stupid laws, but those are the laws. Yes, they may not enforce them on everybody, but they can and probably will find a few scape goats. Not everyone can afford a good defense lawyer in the case when defendant actually broke the most moronic law in the world. The law is still the law, and once it is set so, it becomes more difficult to prove the issue. The goal is to break consumers one by one, not as a group.


As far as the specific problem with such law- the ripping programs, their ownership and distribution becomes illegal. Once there are no rippining programs, you can sit ducks at home with your disks and not much to do about it.

After all, all who pay for the content should have the right to decide what and how they want it. As it appears right now, the industry grows in the largest monopoly, united together with the government to dictate the conditions of purchase to the hooked up customers. This is depressing.

I do like movies, and music. In terms of movies, I have closed the issue with Netflix. I do not buy any BD/DVD discs. I just pay ~19$ per month, and I have enough electronic and disc content for my needs. It is cheaper than “owing “ stuff that you do not actually own. With music it is complicated…. I like HD tracks, because of lossless quality and no stupid protection, but they do not have a lot of stuff. Amazon sells MP3, which is not really that great. Any good website for losless music?

Wow, that post is pretty case in point why the industry is screwed. Movie and music companies are now among the least protected industries on the planet, well other than the drug and sex trades I guess. They have almost completely lost their rights, rights which are specifically laid out in the Constitution, not something that they purchased. Google, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, etc... are the real power bases these days, but somehow people try to make out like the music and movie industries are running the country. It ain't so.

People in Congress understand what intellectual property based industries mean to this country. We aren't an industrial country anymore. We are an ideas country these days, and the fruits of some of our only industries in which we are undisputed leaders is being ripped off by everyone. If the IP based industries reach the point where it's just not worth taking substantial financial risks to create new products and companies, we are going to be in a bad way. And it clearly can go that far. It's hardly been any time since the internet became what it is today, and look at the damage it's already done.

If insuring that they not only survive but thrive means you actually have to insert a disc in a player, I'm having a little trouble crying a river for you. If everyone would put as much energy into applying peer pressure to the people around them to stop stealing as they do condemning the IP industries for trying to protect themselves from this threat, we might not be even having this conversation.

It is not the point. The movie and music industry does not need protection, it needs revolution. Jail time and the fine the size of a decent house for making a backup copy of my favorite DVD is not the solution. Re-buying the rights every time disc fails is not the solution for me, as the customer either. The laws of free market cannot be biased so much. If we go through such a struggle that the next in line of fair use, and the majority of consumers starts to fall into the category of criminals, then maybe there is something is wrong with the industry, not the consumers. That is the point.

People in Congress will first protect those, who pay their election campaign. 90% of the weath in this contry belongs to 20% of the population. With 1% of the population essentially having the third of the country. Sure, they have their ways of creating the laws. Who protects the interests of the majority? Did you ever wonder why middle class in this country is getting extinct?



I doubt that such action will give much of an effect. Do you really believe that absolutely all those people who had been using illegal content would really buy it if it was not for free? Do they really have the money and desire to buy it? However, here we are not even talking about piracy. We are talking about personal use of absolutely legally purchased content, which is limited by the laws and the license to the absurd levels. By trying to cut the piracy, these laws more harm the actual customers who support the industry. Who do you think pays for all the attorneys and all the copy protection ( soft and hard )? By the end of the day, all is payed by the end user.
Edited by dima333a - 11/17/12 at 9:01pm

I'm just not going to spend the next week of my life smacking down yet another downloader appologist. I've been down this road so many times that I have no interest in doing it yet again. People like you are going to believe what you want to believe, and after I did spend that week exposing the fundamental flaws in your world view, another person would show up saying exactly the same thing immediately thereafter and it would start all over again. The internet has created an entire generation of people like you, and I don't know what it's going to take to get rid of you at this point.

Sorry, I think people like you will get extinct, like the dinosaurs of pre-internet times, used to physical distribution of content and not accepting the changes. The industry will be forced to change, change the distribution models, change the form of the media. In fact, it has already happened. We have internet streaming services, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. You can buy MP3 and flac music online! There is internet radio now, and soon the software will be cloud based. The new MS Office will have many cloud extensions. Some software, such as Android is actually already free and holds rather well against payed versions. Frankly, I do not think we will see any new disc distribution modes after Blue Ray. It might be the last dinosaur of your era as well The current enforcements, like " do not copy, or die" will just extend the agony of defeat for the old business model, based on physical media. WIl it all be free? No, but this discussion is not about stealing or unprotecting something, this discussion is about the fair use and comfort/flexibility of use for the legally purchased content.

All it needs is that the new generation gets to the executive levels in the companies, which are currently occupied by the people who actually have withnessed the birth of LPs and tubes

Considering that this thread is more about the personal ripping of legally purchased content for personal backup/enjoyment in a personal home, do you agree that there is a distinct difference between people who download movies from the internet and those who simply rip a DVD to their home media server to avoid watching all the trailers, warnings and crap at the start of the movie?

Of course there's a difference, just like there's a differerence between people who drive responsibly and those and those who don't or who use guns responsibly and those who don't. The problem is that the law cannot pre-distinguish between them. That's just the way it is. If enough people abuse something, then all of us end up losing because of the need to stop them. If as many people drove recklessly as download music, I'm pretty sure that those of us who do drive responsibly would nonetheless be looking at a lot more restrictions on our driving.

I never said anything about disc distribution. Streaming is available and will become more so in the future. As to your point above, I kind of imagine that, once those people actually get into executive levels in large companies, they'll have grown up enough to understand that you can't have a company unless you can protect your product from widespread, consequence free theft.

The law certainly CAN distinguish between them - Simply tie the penalties for circumvention of DRM to infringing activities such as ripping and uploading.

If it were that simple, again, we wouldn't be having this conversation. File sharing could easily be stopped in such a situation, but that situation doesn't exist. A huge amount of time is spent out there by people to make it possible to steal digital media without getting caught or noticed. And of course the people who are in the best position to do so really don't want to do it, e.g. ISPs. They have every reason to try to turn a blind eye.

Well, the protection should not affect the rights of legal owners. That is the whole point! (What the point of killing the desease, if it renders patient a vegetable? )The content creator in attempt to protect himself, has to consider the people that are going to support him by paying the money.

Right now, it is not exactly my fight. I already have all my CDs on my home media server and I listen all of them through Logitech streaming system at home. I love it. I can pick and choose through my electronic library with android tablet, see the cover pages of albums and see track names and so on. My eye sight is not great, and the tablet is far superior to any remote / front panel screen.

I own just a few DVDs, because I see no sense in owing DVDs or BDs... simply because I have access to the majority of the content through my Netflix subsciption (been with Netflix since mid 2005?.... or something,,, long enough.). A lot of it is instant streaming service, and it is rather affordable! (much cheaper than cable service). Before I had to pay only 9$ per month, now with their CEO doing some cutting and slushing it is more, and I have added BD option. Frankly I do not see any need to pirate anything.... it is always there for me with my Netflix subscription. Why bother?

However, I do not feel it is O.K. to limit rights of the person who pays money for the DVD or BD disc. Ideally I would like to be able to have everything in electronic form and be able to stream through home server. I would like to be able to rip soundtrack from movies and use it for my home videos. I would like to have the right of having back ups.


P.S. I think Netflix's mode of distribution is great and fights piracy much better than any law. a) - it is affordable b) - you cannot and do not need to copy anything c) it is fairly convenient. That is the whole point of revising the industry - do not try to enforce, what you cannot enforce. Change the way you are doing business, so that enforcing is not required. There are a lot of examples when piracy is not an issue, simply because of the business model.

P.S. II - Another example of bad protection is SACD - a great format, great sound, heavy protection. It has lost to CD badly. SONY finally stopped making SACD ( sad sad sad story). Sometimes protecting does not mean actually making it difficult to copy/ to get. Sometimes protection can be done though making it unnesesary to steal. ( As one guy said- it is much easier to survive if nobody wants to kill you. While having the army, may not protect you if somebody really really wants to kill you.
Edited by dima333a - 11/18/12 at 8:48am

One more time. Ripping your legally owned DVDs and BDs will not get you into trouble. Technically illegal, yes, but no one has been sued for it, nor is ever likely to be.

The notorious court cases or pre-trial settlements and fines were about file sharing. So let's be clear about that.

The Betamax case established the precedent for "time shifting" under fair use doctrine. By logical extension, the affirmative defense of fair use in a test case challenging the ban on decryption could very well lead to a ruling in favor of "space shifting". Which is of course the purpose of those ripping their legally owned optical media. Again, I maintain a test case on this will be very unlikely.

DRM means inconvenience to those who only want to put their movies on their servers or media players, whatever. Yes indeed, and I blame the pirates, illegal distributors, freeloaders, whatever you want to call them. Such people will always be with us. The difference is that today a perfect digital copy can be easily made of copyrighted material and the internet facilitates wide distribution. Denying it's a problem for the owners of intellectual property flies in the face of the facts.

To rip your movies means you need a decrypter. That's just how it is. If you resent paying for one, use the free version of DVDFab after the trial runs out (DVDFabHDDecrypter). It (supposedly) isn't updated as promptly as the pay version to deal with latest anti-copy protections. If you're not trying to rip the latest movie from your local Redbox, what's the problem? Wait a couple weeks and rip your legally owned movie. One can also use MakeMKV (free while it's still beta), or perhaps DVDFabPasskey "Lite" (free) in conjunction with Clown_BD to extract main movie.

Getting upset about the ruling is silly. It merely affirms the status quo of the last several years.
Edited by fritzi93 - 11/18/12 at 5:30am

Netflix actually does almost as much damage to the film industry as piracy. Netflix actually cheapens the brand of films and TV Shows by giving subscribers all they want for a low monthly fee. Sure, the various studios get money out of it, but at the same time it makes it that much tougher to sell the same titles individually, and certainly not at the prices they once did.

iTunes did the same thing to the music industry. Again, it gave the industry a way to get some money from digital sales, but at the same time it cheapened the CD. Remember the days when Tower Records and Sam Goody had most of their CDs for $18.99? Nowadays CDs are more likely to be found for $9.99 due to the fact that the digital version costs about that price.

Both of these things helped the consumer, no doubt about that.

As for the failure of SACD, that had very little to do with copy protection, and much more to do with the huge shift in how music is experienced. To get the full SACD experience, you really needed to listen to them on a good sound system. Most people made the shift to listening to music using tiny earbuds with MP3 players. Because of this, most people didn't care about the perceived improvement as they were never going to hear it. And much like people who can't really see the difference between a blu-ray and an upconverted DVD, how many people were going to hear the difference between a CD and an SACD?

What Netflix really does, it allows people to enjoy the content without breaking the law. There are many aspects:
1. Breaking the law with Netflix is more difficult and actually there are fewer reasons for it
2. With Netflix people actually getting used to pay for the content. That is a very important aspect.
3. Because of the delays in the releases, the auditory of fat wallets and eager to have the content immediately has the opportunity to pay the creators the big buck, while those on the budget have eventually the opportunity to see the content for a modest fee. (Again, jacking up the prices is not always the way to increase the profits. If you look at he sales records for the expensive brands - they are often unimpressive. Toyota makes more money and strives, while some of the "not- so-cheapend-brands" have changed hands due to finansial difficulties many times over. It is a common mistake to think that a price increase will not result in decline of the sales. BTW, have you seen what happend to Netflix after their fee increase? The company almost went down, with the loss of significant number of subscribers. I doubt they make as much money as they were making a year ago. Their stock is down too. I presume some of it is actually customer relationship issue. However, it is also the affordability isse. The people that were willing to pay smaller fee, will simply stop using the content for the higher fee. Who wins? )


Frankly, I think selling digital content for the same money as physical media is a rip off. The CD/DVD/BD comes with the box, with printed booklet and with the actual CD. Moreover, the distribution of physical content is more expensive, since you need storage for all the boxes with the discs. One jewel case - is not a big deal, but thousands of discs for a large store - that is a lot of space that needs to be paid for until those discs are sold. You also need trucks to deliver all those disc to the stores and sure the actual manufacturing site. You need people physically handling the boxes. While with the digital distribution you can convert the master file from the studio and upload it on the server one time. That should make a price difference of a buck or two. I understand if the price is the same or higher, when the quality of digital content is high, such as with HDtracks.com. There you can actually buy master-quality content for a few more $, and again, I love it.

Both those things helped normalizing the relationship between the consumers and the entertainment industry. Somehow people refuse to understand that high fees and strict laws will not make the industry strive.

The quality shift between CD and SACD is not the point. The majority of users are O.K. with MP3 quality and CD quality is already over the top. On the other hand, the studio already produces master quality content and it does not cost them much more to release a higher quality disc. SACD could have displaced the CDs as a more modern and higher quality format. Those with earbuds and MP3 palyers could have converted their SACDs to MP3 for their players, while people who enjoy the quality could have better content available. The same way as it happened with LPs and CDs.Unfortunately it did not happen.

The above opinion is can be debated by the fact that movies and TV shows on Netflix are those that have lost their retail sales "mojo" and a business model offers new life and revenue to the studios for otherwise dead content. At first the studios did offer this dead mojo content too soon but with contract renewals they came up with a more appropriate time delay average of waiting one more month before the content appears on Netflix. The studios are not forced to deliver their content to Netflix, they do this to boost revenue for otherwise dead content. The studios do not agree with your opinion and welcome a Netflix business model to breathe new revenue life into content that otherwise would not earn a dime. You need to study the complete life cycle of profit from the motion picture entertainment industry to understand why what you suggest is not what the studios want.

What makes it tough to sell old dead titles for high retail prices is not Netflix, but new movie releases to dazzle the buying public.

Actually Netflix could have several subscription options with the difference in availability delay. You pay a little bit more, and you get new titles a bit earlier. Cheaper subscription would give you access to the newer titles with more delay. It is so easy to control !

P.S. With the development and popularization of internet, nobody fights e-mail. I would imagine, e-mail has reduced the amount of regular mails substantially. E-mail is actually free and nobody blames the fact that e-mail users must pay for the fast and quality service. The users do pay to internet provides though, in bulk for the internet usage. There is not much piracy or illegal stealing the internet, or sharing the internet. Again, the business model makes a big difference. I assume a law can be drafted to ban internet communication, forcing people to use regular mail. There would be illegal messaging servers, and high penalties for transferring information from one user to another.
Edited by dima333a - 11/18/12 at 11:49am

Why piracy is striving in the third countries? It is simple, because the price is not adequate. The majority simply cannot afford it and among the majority there are enough smart people to break any kind of protection. Enforcing anti-piracy laws there is not effective. Often the money spent on forcing people not to use illegal content cannot be compensated by the increased revenue. They will either use the content for free or low fee, or not use it at all. Moreover, driving high price and tougher laws promotes the increase in criminal activities. People are driven to the point of breaking the law and getting used to the fact that is the normal way. Selling content for cheap in the third countries would promote compliance with the law, respect to the content creators and helped normalize the situation.

Similar situation is here. The forceful limit on the usage of legal content, as I can see by the comments here, results in desperation. People say that they will use now illegal software and essentially break the law because they do not feel it is illegal. That establishes certain criminal mindset - the consumers start sorting out the laws on those that are LAWS and those that can be broken because they are not fair. That is really bad. That is actually another stupidity of the industry that brings the problem to the dead corner and does not really help. The only path to proper solution is to establish the business models that promotes compliance with the law, respect to the creators and reflects the needs of the consumers. Unfortunately the people who make the decisions still are not really clear on this. All they see are the losses and the pirates, while they should see potential customers and the profits.

The piracy, in essence is very similar to prostitution. The prostitution is the social issue, a product of social and criminal laws mixed together with the natural desires of human beings. The piracy is a product of advancements in technology, poor business models and wrong legal approach, not understanding the needs of the market and the consumers.
Edited by dima333a - 11/18/12 at 11:51am

Put these two ideas together, and it's easy to see that the content producers are doomed in the long term unless the middle class can re-assert itself. If it can't, then the prices and restrictions of copyrighted content will continue to rise as the audience shrinks, and everybody loses. Not reading anything into this, it's just the simple overriding economic law of supply and demand.

As home server technology continues to improve, so will the demand for decryption technologies. It makes no sense whatsoever for the content creators to penalize and restrict paying customers from using their content as they see fit. All this will do is turn them into renters, as the benefit of ownership in this regard is severely diluted. This is already the trend, and it will continue to be so as long as the policies of the content producers continue to be so draconian and short-sighted.

Yes. Amazon.com. Buy used CDs for a lot less than the digital formats and rip them yourself, using FLAC or ALAC, and preserve the original Redbook audio quality.

Dude that quote is awesome... you know, of course, that the current generation of Silverbacks (that refers to the dinosaurs that you describe above) are the very ones the have revived tubes and LPs. And the funny part is, it's mostly kids like you that are buying LPs, because someone told you it was cool to listen to vinyl.

On the physical media part... you probably already know this, but the studios are already shooting new movies in 8K and 16K resolution. With consumer 4K right around the corner, you should think about what that means for downloading. I read recently that an uncompressed 4k version of the trailer for The Amazing Spiderman takes 500GB of disk space. At this size, it would be impossible to fit a full-length 4K film onto a terabyte drive, let alone a 50GB Blu-ray. Of course, like Blu-ray video, 4K content will be compressed in order to fit onto more convenient optical media, rather than carried around on hard disks. We just don't know what that medium will be.

With larger screens and projectors coming, along with retina displays on more reasonable panels, you can be sure that folks will move up to higher resolutions.

Most folks won't be able to 'stream' or casually download these movies, leaving optical plastic (e.g. 120GB BD-XL or some future version) as the only reasonable option.

Like Cinavia, I believe this is part of a larger strategy to fight piracy (as well as to sell more consumer electronics gear).

Unfortunately though, resolution is a somewhat limited strategy, for the same reason that music doesn't benefit from availability in much higher resolutions than MP3. It probably can't hurt, and the types of folks who hang out around here will love it, but most folks will probably be plenty happy with a down-sampled version andit only takes one person out there to provide that.

Heh... unfortunately I am not as young, as you might think. Also, I firmly believe in solid state, and still like old fashioned tape. In my rack i keep 3 head dual capstan beauty for an occasional evening of nostalgia. I did have LP player about 20 years ago, with a tube amp. It is all gone now. I remember I could record music from FM stations in stereo, directly to a good tape, and there was no big fuss about it. Yes, the beginning would be cut off, because it would take me some time to recognize if it was worth to even bother. The end would be chewed by the radio guy, giving some comments. If I liked it, I would try to figure out the artist and get a good record. If not, it could be erased as well. Again, no big deal.

As far as the current LPs and tubes... Well... the LP is pretty much dead. Most of the .... Hmmm, the absolute majority of studio and live recording is done in digital anyway. Converting digital to analog and making LPs is nothing more but extravagant and expensive way to imitate the past. The tubes are different, because of the distortions. The ratio of dominant harmonic distortions is want makes the difference. You can make a good tube amp even these days, but it gets way too expensive. It is especially true if you want to listen to the rock and the roll..For jazz and some easy listening tubes can do for a modest fee. Also, keep in mind, tubes are not forewer. The cathode does loose emission and overtime tubes must be changed.


That does not frighten me at all. First of all, the 4k or 8K resolution would really be needed for a large screen. For a regular 40-50" screen, the DVD quality is OK, BD quality is more than enough. As far as download speeds... I had more worries when I was using 33k dial-up modem and I would need to wait until a web page would load up completely. My buddy in the university showed me a video on his computer, which was like 120x90 pixels resolution. His 486DX4 100 HZ (!) was barely handling it. I still remember my neighbor’s AMD K6-233, which would statter on MP3 song if you browse another folder. Now, I can watch HD content in real time through the internet, and I do not even need computer. The network cable goes directly to the TV !. Do you really believe in 5-10 years we will not be able to watch 8 k video streaming through the internet?

Didn't they just rule that it was legal earlier this year? They've changed their minds again? Geez.

You and I have very different definitions of the word "reasonable".

Well, in my world, reasonable means I don't put a convenience of my own above the fundamental rights of another. Though, having said that, the post you are responding to was referring to people just flat out stating that they had the right to take anything they wanted and anyone who tried to stop them was wrong. This was and still is a commonly held opinion out there in internet land, and it's not reasonable at all, nor is it moral or legal.

The issue of ripping isn't, as has been pointed out many times by now, about your personal right to rip what you legally own. It's about a much larger issue. Personal ripping of owned content is only getting caught in the crossfire because too many people don't take a moral or reasonable position, and thus it's come to this.

I know that the digital copy is there and is similar to what I mean but it tends to be a lower resolution and not have HD audio...also, the digital copy can only be dowloaded to one computer...unless I am wrong about that...

What I mean is we are allowed to make our copies whenever needed. So If I reformat my computer and lose my copy, I can re-rip it to my computer without having to download a lesser quality version....most of these digital copies can only be downloaded for a limited time. And also, the ultraviolet movies I have found sometimes dont allow me to access the movie from Windows Media Player for some reason....

I dont want to be restricted by how I can watch the media that I paid for but I also understand why they dont want people to rip movies as there is the bootlegging problem.

However, If I want to have all my media saved on a central server to turn on without having to put in a disc I want that ability as well.

I dont even have a problem buying digital copies from Amazon. However, I want it in HD with HD Audio.

A simple solution, legally, would be to let content purchasers rip/copy their media for personal use/flexibility/backup, but not to let them burn that content back to optical disc format. Things like SD cards complicate the issue a bit, but as far as selling counterfeit copies goes, being prevented from returning the content to the original medium would be a big deterrent to illegal distribution. Enforcement, as always, complicates the issue further but one way to implement a policy like this would be to police the software creators. Disallow the compression/burning part of the software bit allow the decryption/ripping. Who knows, if a policy like that was successful maybe DRM/encryption would be deemed unnecessary.
Edited by vincecooks - 11/20/12 at 10:50am

It sounds like you are talking about commercial piracy, which I don't think is the real concern anymore. No one really cares about burning it back onto a medium, all that matters is ripping it so it can be gotten onto disc, and hence to the internet. That's the issue. I think that commercial pirates are probably ultimately doomed by the internet as well. Though anyone with the resources to engage in larger scale commercial piracyprobably wouldn't have much problem getting around any such limitations anyway. Burners must exist, in order to the create the (legitimate) originals, and if they exist they can be purchased.

Haven't followed this thread or the issues involved, but fwiw:

Rep. Darrell Issa Wants To Make It Clear That You're Allowed To Rip Your DVDs...