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A technical question about copyright


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For question is for those who agree with Intellectual Property Rights.

Over the years, I've amassed a substantial collection of DVD movies. Per my understanding, I understand that these can be copied to a hard drive, and viewed from the hard drive, providing I still own the DVD.

Now if I were to take the physical disc and put it in a garage sale, or even just give it away, the electronic copy should be removed.

The question is: If the physical copy were purposely destroyed (say to free up limited storage space), does that act also destroy the right to preserving the electronic copy?

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6 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

The question is: If the physical copy were purposely destroyed (say to free up limited storage space), does that act also destroy the right to preserving the electronic copy?

Interesting question.  It appears that movie DVD's and music CD have different rules wrt to making archival copies and Fair Use laws.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/its-still-illegal-to-rip-dvd-and-blu-ray-discs-for-personal-use/

Edit:  I own only a few DVD's and have never tried to make an electronic copy.  Are they encrypted in such a way to prevent that happening as the article suggests?

Edited by New Buddha
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7 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

For question is for those who agree with Intellectual Property Rights.

Over the years, I've amassed a substantial collection of DVD movies. Per my understanding, I understand that these can be copied to a hard drive, and viewed from the hard drive, providing I still own the DVD.

Now if I were to take the physical disc and put it in a garage sale, or even just give it away, the electronic copy should be removed.

The question is: If the physical copy were purposely destroyed (say to free up limited storage space), does that act also destroy the right to preserving the electronic copy?

Your understanding applies to music CDs.

Ethically the right thing is keeping a copy of what you paid for.  Legally, one never had a right to make an electronic copy with or without a corresponding physical DVD purchase and possession.   The special purpose rent-seeking legislation that was the DMCA simply made it illegal to break the encryption on most video DVDs for any purpose whatever.

Since hypothetically one having made copies would already be in violation of the law regardless of the presence of physical backups, one could destroy the physical versions with no change of one's legal status.  How that hypothetical situation answers your question I leave up to you.

(I am pro-IP rights but against non-objective unenforceable IP laws.  Copyright law should essentially be about redistribution.)

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Yes, I was pondering it as an extension of the principle as I understood relating the music angle. It is good to know that legally movies and music considered differently.

Thanks for the responses. Currently the space issue is primarily due to the DVD case packaging. The electronic copy consideration is of interest to make locating any particular movie easier by automatically keeping the list alphabetized.

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45 minutes ago, dream_weaver said:

... legally movies and music considered differently.

Actually, the legal distinction is that encrypted data is considered differently.  Music CDs have never been encrypted.

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43 minutes ago, Grames said:

Actually, the legal distinction is that encrypted data is considered differently.  Music CDs have never been encrypted.

What I was thinking (but misstated) was: legally, movies and music are considered differently. More essentially, as you indicate, it is the encrypted data that is used as the legal differentia here.

Hmm. A DVD can be played (decrypted) in a DVD player on a computer. This suggests that the decryption key is in the DVD hardware unit. Presumably if the file on the DVD could be copied to the hard drive, this would suggest that the general accessing of the hard-drive would not have the decryption capability, rendering a copied file as inaccessible.

Edited by dream_weaver
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1 hour ago, dream_weaver said:

Presumably if the file on the DVD could be copied to the hard drive, this would suggest that the general accessing of the hard-drive would not have the decryption capability, rendering a copied file as inaccessible.

Edited 1 hour ago by dream_weaver

Some (most common ones today? I'm no expert) software players can emulate what a DVD player does and play protected DVD files straight off the hard disk.  Brief history of DeCSS on wikipedia, which made it possible to watch DVDs on Linux computer systems. 

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