Disney: evil, but defeatably evil

Disney DVD’s slogan is Moves, Magic and More.  They got the more part right for sure.

There I am trying to back up my copy of Wall_e_lic2_d1 so that once the kids have scratched the living bejesus out of the playing version, a new one can be generated from the master. And also as to avoid the annoying ads, language selection and other remote-control-based activity at the start – just shove it in the DVD player and walk away. Thankfully Australian copyright law lets me do this.

The studio have been dicking around with the disk’s table of contents, giving it over seventy files it claims are five gig in size – which, giving the DVD specification, is not possible. What you need to do in circumstances like this is play it in some player that will tell you what the magic track that actually contains the movie, not some hacked version of it. Then back that one up.

In the case of this particular disk it’s track 53, 1:33:26 long weighting in at 5425.95MB in size.

Thing is, DVDShrink barfs on it. Like it does Cars, but for different reasons. Thankfully I’ve recently discovered that Linux has an equivalent to DVDShrink, but this one is still being maintained. K9copy is it’s name; Cars was processed with no problems, and it was only the tomfoolery on Wall-E that caused a pause in activity.

So there’s one less application that I need a copy of Windows to run.

8 thoughts on “Disney: evil, but defeatably evil

  1. Lachlan Wetherall

    Sorry to burst your bubble, but my understanding is that Australian copyright law doesn’t currently allow for the copying of DVD’s for backup/private/domestic use. (See the information sheet at http://www.copyright.org.au/g097.pdf) It ought to, but it doesn’t.

  2. josh Post author

    My research seems to support your position. I can copy VHS to DVD as much as I like, but not DVD to DVD. Australian copyright law is almost as nuts as the US.

    Interestingly, the major distributors seem to beg consumers to copy their movies by putting those incredibly annoying, non-skippable anti-piracy warnings on the start of most disks. Do they think the kids downloading their movies off the interwebs ever see these ads? Pfh. And the money-lost-to-piracy figures; do they really believe that had it been impossible to obtain a free copy of the copyrighted material, the individuals who copied it would have actually bought it?

    Well, I’m off to destroy all my infringing copies of my DVDs now and will only use the orginals in the future.

  3. Philip

    Ooh yes. Our copyright laws (for music at least) permit you to make a copy that involves a change of format. So making MP3s from a CD is OK, or making a tape of a record is OK, but you can’t make a CD copy of a CD. If movies are the same, then you can’t make a DVD copy of a DVD for your own use, but you could make a Blu-Ray copy of a DVD without drama (unless it’s specifically forbidden).

    Go with that.

  4. daniel

    So Josh, just copy the DVDs onto your computer, convert them to XVid or something and keep them there. Should be legit, no?

    (I suppose copying from a pressed DVD onto a DVD-R doesn’t count.)

  5. Josh Parris

    There are various (government issued) discussion papers out there that say something to the effect of you can only have one backup digital copy of something you’ve bought, and it’s got to be in another format to the one you bought it in. So you can rip your CD into MP3 and transfer to your iPod, but then you’ve got to delete the MP3s off your computer. Under this reasoning, MPEG2 DVD->reauthored MPEG2 DVD isn’t cool, but a DivX of the original should be fine – which is ridiculous. You’ve got to have a different format? Why? Why not just one digital backup copy?

  6. daniel

    That’s not the way iTunes works, of course. If you delete the MP3s off the computer, they’ll be removed from the iPod as well because it’s synched to the copies on the computer.

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