The precedent set by the Betamax court case and the "fair use" clause of copyright law says that you can make a backup copy. However, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent ANY cryptologic copy protection.
All of the DVD rippers out there work by breaking the CSS copy protection on the DVD, most of them are based on the work of "DVD Jon" who was the first to crack it. Incidently he had to do it to develop DVD drivers for Linux since none of the big companies were bothering to do it. Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd_jon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax_case -- Brian
