As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.
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Member since:2008-03-17
I would have to agree: storm in a teacup...
It's not like to copyright police are going to storm into your house and arrest you. There are plenty of tools on the net that make ripping dvds an absolute breeze.
What you might be more wary of is downloading illegal/pirated content. The only reason I do it is due to the reasons outlined in the article:
Official content is just too difficult to format/time/place shift.
I watch tv shows on my ps3 streamed from my media server. I get torrents that automatically come from an rss feed, easy and no fuss. So from my perspective railing against media unavailability is pretty much void, although I can understand those that do not want to follow my methods.
Member since:1997-10-01
As stupid as it may seem, simply by virtue of the fact that DVDs have a rudimentary copy protection scheme, breaking that and copying them is a violation of the DMCA in the United States. As I specified in the article, that doesn't make it morally wrong. But it is technically illegal at this time.
Member since:2006-01-14
The only one being a tool here is you. The DMCA makes ripping dvd's illegal. If it wasn't, then the MPAA could not have had sales of RealDVD stopped. But they did. Because it IS illegal. Now maybe no one is ever going to stop you. But if your ever under suspicion for any other major crime, you can bet they will use it as a stick to poke you with.
Member since:
2006-02-09
"...if I were to rip my DVDs and put them on a media server, I would be in a legal gray area."
This was settled by the Supreme Court decades ago. You are simply too spineless to exercise your 'fair use' rights because of an unreasonable fear of prosecution.
Get a new job.