Is it legal to break the encryption on a DVD I own to make a copy for myself?
Please don’t tell me how to do this, I just want to know if I legally can.
No, it isn’t legal. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (if you’re in the US) and other similar acts in other countries preclude it.
DVDs are encrypted with a system called “CSS”. Now, the industry will tell you this is to stop illegal copying, but it doesn’t because people who sell illegally copied discs just copy the disc bit for bit. What CSS does is prevent a person from extracting a particular segment from a DVD. Let’s say you really like a particular scene and want to send an MPEG to a friend. With CSS, that’s supposed to be harder.
CSS is also used to get money and create monoplies on computer DVD playing. Microsoft and Apple must pay to the consortium for the decryption keys, which they must keep secret, but free-software projects like Linux cannot pay for something and keep it secret, because they must make their source code available for review. So, on Linux there is no way to watch a DVD besides breaking the encryption.
So anyway, in some countries, including the US, breaking CSS is illegal. No one really cares though because no one at all is using it for illegal copying and selling. Most Linux distributions come with libdvdcss (the necessary software to break it) so you can enjoy what you just spent $20 on.
UnuMondo
I was under the impression that it was only in the US it was illegal, as a direct result of the DMCA…what other countries is it illegal in?
Um, just to clarify, you are perfectly free to write a closed-source dvd player for Linux. Furthur, you can release any subset of code for it you’d like. For the purposes of getting people to help with your project, it would help if you released most, if not all of it. For the purposes of getting people to install it, it would help if you released it all. (Some people because they’re ideologically opposed to closed source, most because they have a distrust of programs they don’t know the contents of).
Basically, no company cared about the subset of viewers who used Linux enough to make a player for it. This happened to be a group who find math, algorithms, coding and/or reverse engineering electronics to be fun things to indulge in on the weekend; and they all wanted to watch The Matrix.
But to your point: you don’t need to break the encryption to make a copy. (This point was never made explicitly clear in the trials, even though it nullifies the prosecution’s stupid arguments) You only need to do so to play it, and you already, I presume, have a legit DVD player. My personal simile is to imagine someone asks you to copy a French (or even Chinese) manuscript. You can do so perfectly. If they ask you to read it, you probably can’t.
Give either copy to someone who speaks French/Chinese, and they won’t be able to tell the difference.
For a more complete (and interesting) analysis of the actual legalities of breaking this “encryption” for whatever purpose, may I recommend this site, where among other things you can get a t-shirt and tie that can help you watch DVDs.
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- I don’t blame media companies at all for wanting to prevent people from making copies illegally, but if you investigate the matter of digital anti-copy systems and the people who hack them for whatever reasons, you read that a new copy protection is usually overcome within 3-4 days after the first discs hit the public.
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- And the funniest thing I have seen so far concerning digital copying was that the corporate support site for the CD-RW drive I bought has/had a webpage with a list posted of what software you needed to make copies of copy-protected CDs, depending on what anti-copy-protection systems the CDs used…
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Sorry, just repeating my previous question (ie. what countries other than the USA is it illegal in?). Does anyone have a good answer or should I make it a different GQ?
If you’re curious about DVD encryption and the legality of cracking CSS code, there’s some good reading at http://www.2600.com and http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/
I believe CSS does protect against casual copying of DVDs, though not professional copying. You can’t make a “bit for bit” copy of a DVD onto a DVD-R because certain parts of the DVD-R are unwritable.
No, that’s nothing to do with CSS. It’s because pressed DVDs have 2 layers to read and DVD-R can only burn 1 layer so it only has half the capacity.
Now that I’ve said that, I’m slightly drunk, very tired, so I might be wrong…but look it up…I think I’m right.
Many pressed DVDs are only single layer. You can usually tell the difference by looking at the data side - single layer discs are silver, dual layer discs are gold.
But even if you have a single layer disc, you can’t just copy it onto a DVD-R. As we discovered in this thread, DVD-R General media is designed to make it physically impossible to copy CSS encrypted discs. You may be able to do it with DVD-R Authoring media (or not, depending on which site you believe), but the Authoring drives and media are so expensive that there’s no point.
… if it’s encrypted with CSS, that is. Some pressed discs (adult movies, etc.) lack CSS encryption, and indeed you can copy those just by burning the files to another disc.