This is illegal in the US, which means it's rad as hell.
U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
Existing copyright statutes may apply to specific acts of personal copying, as determined in cases in the civil or criminal court systems, building up a body of case law. Consumer copyright infringement cases in this area, to date, have only focused on issues related to consumer rights and the applicability of the law to the sharing of ripped files, not to the act of ripping, per se.
I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court, though. And even the DMCA itself does provide for a rather clunky system of "exemptions" to the no-circumvention provision.
> The 2021 exemptions, issued in October 2021, are for:[15]
> Motion pictures (including television shows and videos), as defined in 17 U.S.C. 101, where circumvention is undertaken solely in order to make use of short portions of the motion pictures for the purpose of criticism or comment, for supervised educational purposes, to accommodate for accessibility for disabled students in educational institutions, for preservation of the motion picture by a library, archive, or museum, or for research purposes at educational institutions;
And that exemption only adds cases in which stripping DRM from a DVD becomes legal. It's still generally illegal, and most people using makemkv are likely using it illegally.
The reason you can’t find a commercial vendor that will directly ship something to bypass the DRM is because it also says “No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”
This is also why for a while the t-shirts with the dvd decss key were popular among nerds, because they are illegal.
Are you saying this is incorrect?