text: My understanding of the law is that you are allowed to make a backup copy of a DVD that you make.  For example a DVD movie of you and your friend.  \n\nYou are not allowed under the law to buy a DVD of a Hollywood movie and then back it up to your Hard drive.  \n\nFor example in the united States you are allowed to buy a Music CD and rip it into a MP3 file on your computer yet for movies this is not allowed.  \n\nI was watching a episode #1 of on confused Nerd TV and they were talking about this exact situation.\n\nHere is a copy of conversation they were having.\n\nBandwidth is not decreasing, you know. It's an incredible lesson, when I first put my server together over six years ago it was a little bit of a strain. It could barely compress things in real time. Now I stick a CD in there and get it all ripped and compressed in under five minutes. It's just little corner of most people's hard disks. So the next things are the movies, which have an order of magnitude size of information, so I've started doing those as well. I put together a movie server for myself that now has over 500 works on it.\nBob: Really?\nAndy: It's illegal, because one of the worst laws I'm aware of, the DMCA says that even though I buy the DVD I can't copy it onto my computer.\nBob: I forgot you are a criminal.\nAndy: I'm a criminal in more ways than one.\nBob: Our new Attorney-General will be watching this.\n\n\nhttp://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/001.html\n\nYou can watch episode #1 here.\nhttp://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/