Hollywood says that burning a backup of your Austin Powers in Goldmember DVD is illegal, and it builds in copy protection to stop you. But a small firm denies kinship to Dr. Evil just because it markets software that lets anyone with a rewritable DVD drive make an exact copy of a commercial DVD.

321 Studios' $100 DVD X Copy is the first product to let users dub an entire DVD movie onto a blank DVD. In our trials, we saw that the copy even includes the menus, special features, and enhanced audio.

The Motion Picture Association of America argues that such products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans providing information or tools to evade copy-control technology, including the Contents Scramble System that's used on DVD media.

But Robert Moore, president and founder of 321 Studios, says users have a fair-use right to make personal backup copies of DVDs they buy. "We are offering for the first time a tool that allows you to exercise that consumer right," he says.

No DMCA Violation?

To appease its Hollywood critics, 321 Studios has built its own copy protection into its software. The program inserts electronic controls into the DVD copies to prevent them from being duplicated further. It embeds a digital watermark capable of tracing a movie file transmitted over the Internet back to the software's licensed owner--pointing the finger at peer-to-peer file sharers (registration is required when you install DVD X Copy). In addition to the federal disclaimer, it inserts another disclaimer at the beginning of each recorded DVD, telling viewers that the disc is a backup copy intended for personal use only.

Moore claims that DVD X Copy doesn't break the CSS code on DVD movies. Rather, it intercepts the video and audio stream after a DVD player has decrypted CSS to show the movie. Because it doesn't interfere with the disc's encryption, he argues, it does not run afoul of the DMCA.

The assertion that consumers' fair-use rights supersede the DMCA is debatable, since the DMCA provides no exemption for fair use, says copyright-law expert Evan Cox, a partner in the Covington and Burling law firm in San Francisco. If DVD X Copy does indeed manage to copy a DVD without breaking CSS, however, it may present "an interesting legal challenge" for anyone who argues DVD X Copy violates the DMCA, Cox adds.

321 Studios is no stranger to controversy. It preemptively sued nine major Hollywood studios to certify that its older DVD Copy Plus software, which transfers movies to CD, does not run afoul of the DMCA.

The MPAA recently responded with a counter suit, which alleges that both DVD Copy Plus and DVD X Copy violate the DMCA. It seeks to halt sale of the products and wants all profits made on sales as recovery of damages. Both cases were unresolved as of press time.

On Sale Now

While the lawsuit is pending, sales of DVD X Copy will likely continue. It should be at stores such as CompUSA and Fry's, or for download at www.dvdxcopy.com. It works with all rewritable DVD formats. 321 Studios also distributes it via other firms, such as Tritton Technologies, which bundles it with Tritton DVD+RW Viper Drives (internal unit, $349; external model, $449).

In our trial of one such Tritton drive, we easily copied the Panic Room DVD in about an hour. The one notable snag: Movie DVDs hold more than 4.7GB of data, so we couldn't fit the movie on a rewritable DVD--we needed two discs. (DVD-RAM drives have 9.4GB discs, but the format is incompatible with many DVD players.) You don't lose scenes and you can preview and set the break point, but video stops and starts abruptly. Still, we ended up with an exact copy of the movie, including special features. We also found that, as claimed, DVD X Copy did not let us copy the backup--though another app bundled with Tritton's drive did.

Its legality may be in question, but DVD X Copy certainly works. If you have a DVD burner and movies you'd like to make backups of, you may want to get it--while you can.

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