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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how the laws are contradictory. Commercial disk does not necessarily mean DRM right?

I think most DVD movies have a DRM that you must break to backup the disk.

Yea, no doubt most. But most is not all. So in my opinion it's not ambiguous, and not contradictory. It's still stupid, but it's not really ambiguous. It just means if it has DRM and it's commercial, you'll have to find another way to rip a copy, or go rip a commercial disk without DRM.

Commercial disk doesn't necessarily mean DRM, but major movie studio does.

Yes but the law doesn't specifically say major studio films right? I'm just saying the law itself is not exactly contradictory.

True, there is probably an interpretation of the laws in which they are not contradictory. If the intent of the home backup law was to allow copying of any video/dvd at home, and the intent of the drm law was to stop any copying of videos/dvds, then it really depends what exactly the laws are, and whether a court case about intent can lead to those laws being changed/clarified.

Unfortunately we only have uninformed guesses, so I say wait on it for 3 months and see if the guy gets his day in court. I shall set a date in my calendar to google it :-)

No. Like someone else said, you can make a perfect bitwise copy of a DVD without running afoul of anticircumvention laws--just copy it with the DRM intact.

99% of DVDs use CSS encryption, trivially breakable but encryption still.

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