Groups Petition US Copyright Office: Make DVD Ripping, Xbox Hacking, Legal

Public interest groups Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have lobbied the US Copyright Office to make more exemption to existing copyright laws.

Public Knowledge, a public interest advocacy organization, is asking the US Copyright Office to allow for the personal ripping of DVDs, so that personal "space shifting" can occur. Public Knowledge argues that increasingly, devices come without DVD drives, such as Apple's iPad, and in order to allow consumers to access their movies on such devices, "space shifting" should be allowed so that users can decrypt and convert their movies to the right format.

Under the current copyright legislation, particularly the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), any circumvention of digital copy protection, including DVD's CSS, is illegal, even for personal use.