Do new copyright laws mean we can start ripping DVDs?

The film industry has no say. People in other countries have been allowed to rip DVDs for years, so there’s nothing they can do to stop the UK law changing.

Besides, I don’t think the law really matters as people in the UK have been ripping DVDs to other formats for years now. The software to do so isn’t “illegal” and is available to purchase over the counter in many PC stores, or from Amazon.

The only reason the movie industry is bothered is that if we format-shift ourselves, they can’t milk us for another £5 on ‘special’ box sets which include their own, often inferior, digital copy.

I also find it slightly hypocritical that a lot of companies involved with music and movie production tell us we can’t copy their movies (even for personal use) while selling us CD/DVD copiers from other arms of the company.

It’s great to have the law changed from something which went out of date with the first tape recorder. It’s just a shame its coming a bit to late to actually mean much.
Format shifting will shortly become obsolete for music. CD’s are fading into none existence – Ford just announced that new cars will soon not have CD players and will have a USB port and use over the air waves for receiving music. I imagine most teenagers have never bought a CD, as most music is bought by downloading it. I’m 30, but I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD.
Being able to legally stream your own music from a server, such as Amazon or Google’s offerings will be a great plus for this law.
Companies like Lovefilm and soon netflix are providing us with video streaming, this will soon negate the need for DVD players in the home and is perfectly legal under current law. Soon we will get rid of the DVD players and performing the format swapping to a video file yourself becomes a bit difficult and unnecessary – its already a digital file.
To answer your question – should we be allowed to rip DVD’s ourselves legally. Yes, But, as someone who has a netbook with no internal DVD drive how can I actually rip the DVD? I actually own an external DVD drive, but laptops without a DVD drive aren’t that uncommon and what if you only have an ipad or a tablet. My point is that we are moving away from solid media to streaming and downloads making this change is the law welcome, but too late.

silly. it is just a start. here is an example of how big brother wants to control the internet.
when i was a teenager, my father worked for disney world. he was a contactor for the constuction of epcot. some of the worker’s tools were missing (possibly stolen). these tools were suppied by disney as a part of the contract.
disney wanted to charge all the emploees 5 cents a week for those missing tools. the union said “no”. the union realized it was not the 5 cents. it was the act of disney to start the rule.
that 5 cents a week would turn into 10 cents, 50 cents and eventually 5 dollar, even more. i understand taking something is wrong. dinsey was just trying to protect their profit margin. the people taking the tools should have been charged.
this is the governments way of getting it all started. they want to charge everybody for something that only a few people are doing. we are in for it now! the government will be able to stop any isp they want. on the grounds of copyright infringement. our voice has been silenced.

It’s ridiculous that these laws have been in place for so long in the first place. Perhaps stripping a movie from a DvD to watch on your tablet or iphone is a bit esoteric, but absolutely everyone and in most cases their mother have been ripping music from legitimately bought CDs to put on their multimedia PCs and synch with their MP3 players.

Indeed, despite the success of iTunes, if such behaviour hadn’t been endemic then MP3 players would have been a failed product, instead of something that almost everybody owns in one format or another.

This ‘right sizing’ of British copyright law will have virtually zero impact on the bottom line of digital content providers and on the lives of most people – unless Patrick is correct and it leads to the downfall of DRM on the physical media – in which case it will simply make our lives easier.

If you use linux, or any free OS, you have to use illegal software just to watch the dvd you have purchased, let alone rip it. Watching and ripping are the same processes anyway, one just displays it to the screen, the other just encodes it to disk. There is really no technical distinction, there should be no legal one.

I think downloading movies, music etc should be ok if it for personal use or sharing with family and close friends by moving the download from one computer to another using external memory devices; and if the person downloading can prove they cannot afford to buy the DVD/CD/VHS in the stores or online.