Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General Boy, that was fun! Purchased and returned.

You are only partially correct. In the US, you are allowed to make personal backups but you may not circumvent a copy protection system to do so.

Since commercial DVDs are encrypted with CSS, breaking the CSS to copy a DVD is illegal in the US under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Other countries have also adopted similar schemes (Australia added a similar law as part of the recent US free trade agreement.

Here's part of the law:

"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...] to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner".