Originally Posted by DEVIS
Quite frankly my dear friends, if you've ever gotten a speeding or even a parking ticket, you really shouldn't be worried if copying a DVD is breaking the law.
But since humans are selective creatures that place their own individual importance on what laws are OK to break and what laws aren't OK to break, I will leave the doublestandard to the doublestandardists and try to be helpful.
Buy the damn movie!
I own some 200 movies on DVD. When do I watch them? Whenever I feel like it. What do I watch? Whatever I feel like.
I have this obsession with owning my memories instead of renting them, and while certain movies sometimes are not that memorable, a few gems out there are.
Besides, 200 DVDs, at an average price of 10 dollars a DVD (oooohh how I love BlockBuster's previewed section), spanned over a period of 5 years equals about 500 dollars a year, or about 1 DVD purchase a week and a half, or just 91 cents a day. Hell, I pay more for lunch every day
even today that I decided to go to mcdonalds and get me one double cheeseburger for exactly 1.09 (i donated the penny so that doesn't count).
Some people here spend more than 400 a year only on MRs, heck one MR alone may just be that 400 dollars
This is a very narrow view, for a couple of reasons.
As a pratical matter, you can watch more movies, longer if they're on the hard drive than if you're playing them off the DVD.
However, as a legal matter, it is not at all certain that copying DVDs to a laptop to watch on the plane is illegal. Fair Use doctrine is certainly implicated, and it is impossible to ignore decisions such as Sony v. Universal, and the various MP3 cases which, on their face, would seem to support a finding of Fair Use. On the other hand, the DMCA is also implicated, as copying the DVD requires using decryption software. The case law is far from clear, but there is at least one which suggests that, though a use may be Fair Use, it is still actionable if it also results in a violation of the DMCA.
As an intellectual property lawyer, I am not prepared to say that copying a DVD to a laptop to view on the plane is violative of law (nor am I prepared to say that it is not). However, I'm certainly not going to agree with your contention that it is clearly illegal.