It is not necessarily illegal in the USA. It's not necessarily legal either. Pasted from Wikipedia:
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.
Isn't the act of bypassing DRM itself some violation of DMCA and related laws (however unlikely any enforcement may be) ? Which is also why you can't play commercial DVDs and blu-rays out of the box on Fedora because they won't ship any code that can circumvent DRM.
Yes. Section 1201 says “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
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.
Bypassing the DRM is acceptable for certain use cases, with DVD's it's OK for using clips as a critic or adding additional accessibility features. So something like makemkv is legal while in practice almost every user is breaking the law.
I don't think that's how the law works. There's a fair use exemption for using copyrighted material, however you're still not allowed to bypass DRM to get at the data.
> 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;
> however you're still not allowed to bypass DRM to get at the data.
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.
That's my take for the UK. This is not legal advice. It seems the tech is fine as circumvention for accessibility is allowed (eg under three Marrakesh Treaty); most users probably aren't doing it for accessibility.
Copyright kinda flips this around by saying that copying is (with some exceptions) the exclusive right of the rightsholder. I don't see how this is murky.
The "exceptions" part is pretty significant there. Copying that you do for your own personal use (e.g. format shifting) is especially likely to fall under the "Fair Use"/"Fair Dealing" provisions of copyright law. This was the basis of the Sony vs. Betamax case, which involved home videotaping for format shifting purposes.
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.