Although what you are suggesting doing (transferring or backing up
your purchased VHS tapes onto another media) has generally always been
deemed legal as "fair use" of the copyrighted material you licensed,
the government of the United States recently passed a law called the
Digital Millenium Copyright Act which can make the circumvention of
copyright encyption a criminal act. It can also make describing
methods of circumvention and posting links to circumvention criminal
activity.
Recent cases in which the DMCA has been used have been:
forcing a magazine/website to stop publishing links to software that
allowed people to watch their DVDs on Linux computers
allegedly threatening a university professor with criminal charges if
he went ahead and published a paper that detailed the inadequacies of
a music encryption method.
jailing a foreign national for alleged crimes commited in his home
country, acts which were not only legal in his country, but required
by law there to bring a US company's product into compliance with the
law in that country.
Therefore, despite the fact that what you wish to do should be
completely legal, I don't feel you will get any researcher willing to
post an answer, and I'm not sure that Google would be willing to host
such an answer. Also, as the information contained in the answer could
be used for the commission of illegal activities as well, it may
violate Google Answers terms and conditions to post the answer. |
