No doubt you've been flooded in the past year with e-mail and advertisements touting a "remarkable" piece of software that backs up commercial DVD movies to CD or even to another DVD. Curious? Considering the murky legal issues, you should also be cautious. We'll discuss the issues and the products.

Burning issues
The ability to create copies of the media you've purchased for personal use is a long-accepted facet of the "fair use" doctrine in U.S. copyright laws (at least, it used to be). However, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) says it's illegal to break the copy protection employed by the vast majority of commercial DVD movies. What does that mean? Most fair-use advocates say that the policy directly contradicts U.S. copyright laws, but for now, it does seem to indicate that you cannot make a copy of a DVD, even for personal use, and you certainly cannot give a copied DVD to anyone or watch copied DVD files on your computer. We assume that fair use will eventually catch up and be established as a safety valve for consumers (which has been the pattern with previous technologies, such as VHS), but for now, the territory is undefined and a bit dangerous.

Nevertheless, commercial products aimed at DVD copying continue to appear. They range from packaged versions of freely available apps (such as 321 Studios' DVD Copy Plus), to toe-the-line commercial copying utilities such as DVD X Copy. We've reviewed four choices here; read on to see which is safest and easiest for your copying needs.