Last month, the 5th Circuit court ruled that it is not illegal to rip DVDs as long as you aren’t sharing or selling copyrighted content. That’s great, because I believe if you own the content, you should have it available to you in any format you need. Why should the consumer be forced to purchase the same content more than once if they want to watch it on on more than one device?
For example, I would never purchase or rent a movie or tv show from Apple’s iTunes. Why? I can only watch it on my iPod or on my home PC. If I wanted to watch it on my HDTV, I’d have to first purchase an Apple TV device, which you can only watch content purchased from iTunes. DVDs and Blu-rays are great, but I can’t watch it on my iPod when I’m sitting on the train? It’s abysmal.
For a limited time only until August 9th 2010, iSkysoft is offering a free DVD-to-iPhone converter. I’m going to try it this weekend. I hope this is good.