body: I was trying to find a definitive answer to this question but it seems to be very hard. My DVD collection is rotting in the sense that soon some of them become unusable since the discs are so old. In many countries there is a law which states that you cannot bypass a copy-protection measure in order to make a backup of the rotting DVD's.
  
  
  Technically some copy-protections are implemented simply by encrypting the contents of the disc. Personally, I would argue that if I do not decrypt the contents of the disc and simply make a backup of the encrypted data, I am not bypassing any copy-protection.
  
  
  Is there any cases that confirm or object this viewpoint?
  
  
  I'm not located in the US but I'm interested in the US copyright law as ours is very similar to it. In my country some guy turned in himself to the police in 2006 on a slightly similar case since he wanted to find out whether decrypting DVD's for watching is OK using non-licensed open source software. The court of appeal decided that it was illegal. So technically in Finland it is illegal to watch DVD's using various open source operating systems like Linux.
  
  
  
title: Legality of a raw DVD backup