Today Slashdot linked to an article which has confirmed by law that the ripping of DVDs to a local hard-drive is perfectly legal.
This comes to a relief to many, including me. Especially since I’ve recently been encoding my entire DVD collection into a digital format stored in iTunes for quick access via an Apple TV in the future.
Manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they’ve been afraid of a lawsuit up until now. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise stating, ‘nothing in the agreement prevents you from making copies of DVDs.’
The old Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which does not allow consumers to rip DVDs will be heading out the window very soon.
This is pretty big news and I’m surprised it hasn’t been covered more widespread over the past few days. Now, I can get back to digitizing these movies.
