That way I could make it more accessible within the house for my kids and myself.
And could I take it one step further and make a service where user have to insert their DVD into external drive, then only use a couple of seconds for verification and then activate Torrent download of the same, without lengthy copy process.
If that is legal take it one more step and let the user hand in their DVD for external storage, for a “physical” key (Bitcoin, Ethereum etc) as proof of ownership.
After confirming that you own the disc it is (was?) $2 for SD quality or for $5 you could take a DVD and get an HD version. The catch is that the movies were then added to your Vudu account - not as unencrypted DRM. But, if they were Movies Anywhere eligible, they showed up in your Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft accounts. From there, getting an archival copy is an exercise for the reader.
It didn’t have all the movies. And not every movie was eligible for Movies Anywhere. But, it did work for about 60% of my hundreds DVDs when I went all digital. Plus, this method was clearly legal in the United States, so long as you used your own discs and didn’t make archival copies.
The rights management must’ve been a nightmare.
I am not sure Movies Anywhere has legs though; I doubt owners would be remunerated or retain access to content if the whole thing went belly-up, and I am not sure how they are paying to keep it running.
The principle being, you don’t have the right to watch the movie as such: you have the right to watch _your copy_ of the movie.
If someone gives you an unauthorised copy of something you have a legit copy of… it’s still unauthorised.
So both is your copy.
If I own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, I can rip that, encode it to MP3/AAC/FLAC/whatever, copy it between my laptop/desktop/phone. That’s fine.
If you also own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, then… I cannot give you any of those files, because they have ultimately come from my CD, not from your CD. Even though the bits are identical. The provenance matters. You have the right to use the copies from your CD. You do not have the right to use the copies from my CD, even though the bits are the same.
Outside of the US, saner jurisdictions may prevail.
> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Then I say to myself, if I can bypass the technological measure, it doesn't effectively control access to the work, so it's fine. Especially when they later say
> Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Time shifting, format shifting, and space shifting are all established as fair use in case law; so I don't feel bad about circumventing ineffective controls to a protected work to enable my fair use of the work.
IMHO, electronic distribution without authorization is a clear no, and obtaining a copy through unauthorized distribution is also a clear no. But I'm flexible if the original media is defective. And I'll pretend I didn't see it for things like the Despecialized Editions of Star Wars.
Then next step is that the user can put all those GB on their own Dropbox (not shared). But what Dropbox can do is to do hash-check of the files and only keep one file of all those hundres of compies. Synced to cloud.
Still only the users copy and they can access it at home, just at a fraction of the cost for storing the copy.
The same for the dvd, he could have created the copy from his own?
Because you guys found a different copy, not the one I torrented.
In many European countries it is legal what you describe. In other European countries you don't even have to own the DVD-Blu-ray, as long as you store the "backup" on a storage medium that you bought in that country (there are pirate-taxes added to storage medium prices that are distributed to copyright holders, kind of legalizing movie and music piracy). One thing though: uploading is considered criminal even in these countries (e.g. the downloading part of torrent is OK, seeding even a byte is a big no-no)
But as long as you do it as a private person for your own private use, you can get away with it at many places. (Maybe you noticed that these news about "billy torrented a spongebob episode, and has to pay now a quadrillion moneyz" always come from the same country. In Europe the distribution chain is being chased - torrent site admins, cinema-camera teams, content hosts... but usually not the end-users.)
Of course IANAL. Do your research too - especially because this is really dependent on the country where you are.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
I'm ok with that, personally, but the rightsholders aren't, lol.
It also (interestingly enough, I guess) means that an online random number generator will occasionally produce illegal output because some of those numbers will translate into DMCA circumvention devices. Crazy world we live in where the law can't even catch up to the issues of 3 decades ago, much less today's.
Additionally, if you're torrenting, you're probably also uploading (helping to seed) the file, which is redistribution.
Nothing legal about it under current law. That said, just use an overseas seedbox instead of your home IP and you'll be fine. A lot faster too, since they have fat pipes.
Things can be ethical but still illegal, like in this case. Realistically they're not going to do much more than send you a notice via your ISP (if you don't use a foreign seedbox), but it's still illegal.
You’re not going to create a “clever hack” that allows you to build a for-profit piracy service. Disney is going to own you if you try. Just like they own the politicians that write IP laws.
Just think of a new idea.
(Edit) Pro-tip: Judges don’t care about “it’s different because it’s on the internet/with crypto!”
You could feel morally good about it, but it would still be illegal.
While probably also not legal, what might be easier is to rip the bluray locally instead of downloading it.
It's not legal. DMCA restrictions override fair use. The moment you disable the copy protection on a disc (in order to rip it), you've broken the law. Doesn't matter why you're doing it. Doesn't matter if you're only doing it for personal use and you bought it and won't share it with anyone. It's still illegal. It's stupid, but that's what you get with corporate capture of the government.
From the EFF:
> Sound confusing? It is. Thanks to fair use, you have a legal right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment. But thanks to Section 1201, you do not have the right to break any digital locks that might prevent you from engaging in that fair use. And this, in turn, has had a host of unintended consequences, such as impeding the right to repair.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/what-really-does-and-d...
Edit: There ARE some exemptions to this broad rule, but I don't think any of them apply to "I just want to make a rip of my DVD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
If you just remove the copy protection and copy over the original compression, that should be faster, but then you're left with a huge file that's often bigger than it really needs to be.
300Mbit/s downloads 50GB (dual-layer Blueray) in 22 Minutes