setarip_old wrote:@DaxInside
Hi! do you guys think its worth waiting until makemkv is totally finished before ripping collections of Blurays? Ive just started mine and was thinking of selling the disks after but might hold off for a while as I keep seeing issues on these forums.
You may not be aware that if you sell the original, commercial Blu-ray discs, you would have no legal right to keep the copies of them that you make/made...
You may not be aware that the DMCA makes it illegal to remove the copy protection, so every time you convert a disc using MakeMKV, you are breaking the law. So if you own 100 discs and make MKV's out of all of them, you could go to jail for 500 years if they catch you.
MakeMKV is made by a Russian software company and therefore not bound by the laws of the USA, particularly the DMCA. It would be illegal for them to even develop software such as this in the USA, and it is still something of a grey area if it is even legal for you to own it in the USA, even if you aren't using it.
Once you start down the path of ripping movies off disc, the legality of anything you are doing related to that endeavor pretty much goes out the window. Its all illegal. You just have to decide for yourself whether its unethical or immoral, and how far you go before you cross that line (or if you are worried about jail, how far you can go before a jury thinks you crossed that line).
But from an ethical standpoint, before the DMCA, there was the Fair Use Doctrine. This was the law for many years and is still in effect today. Under the fair use doctrine, it was considered legal for you to record a copyrighted show off TV, and keep it for personal use. It was even legal for you to make a copy of that copy, and give to a friend, as long as you did not profit. So you could pay $40 a month for HBO, tape one movie a day, and be legal, assuming it was used privately and not for profit. You did not need to own the original source material. Not really any different than taking a Netflix disc, making a copy, and returning it. You end up with the same thing, a copy without owning the source. And in todays terms, sharing it with a friend means a torrent. Fair Use was considered ethical at the time (the MPAA even supported it because it was key in making VCR's a viable product, thus creating a market to sell movies to people at home, further allowing movie companies to profit by creating a new source of revenue for their movie vaults), and the only thing that has changed is the technology. Ripping a Netflix disc and sharing by torrent is ethically no different than recording it off HBO (digital or analog recording methods) and putting a copy on VHS or DVD to give to a friend.
All that has changed is that the DMCA made it illegal to bypass or remove content protection methods, if they are deployed by the copyright holder. So owning a copy of a movie, without owning the original disc could still be legal under the current Fair Use laws (assuming private use and non-profit, and how you came to own it). However, removing the copy protection to get that copy off the disc is illegal in the US. So you go to jail for using MakeMKV to remove disc encryption, not for owning copies of a movie without an original source.
I personally choose to keep my original source discs, so that when things come along like the bugs I am finding in MakeMKV, I have an original disc that I can go back to and correct the problem. I currently have over 3000 MKV's (splitting TV shows by episode really ratchet up the numbers) and the thought of trying to reacquire hundreds of discs to correct an error is equally as frightening as the though of spending the time to re-convert all those discs. Put the two together and it would be a total nightmare.
