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Plex Will Block Media Servers at Abuse Prevalent Hosting Company
(torrentfreak.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yes, and no. In theory, you could absolutely "back up" any physical media you have to prevent wear and tear to the disc, which is a completely legitimate use case. And it's not considered piracy because by buying that media, you purchased the legal rights to use it for personal viewing. However, if you ever gave a copy of that rip to another person (or gave that disc away to someone else without deleting your rips), you would be commiting piracy.
In fact, I believe that even viewing the media alongside another person is technically not allowed, although clearly that's not enforced unless you're doing some sort of public showing.
In the USA at least, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made circumventing copy protection mechanisms illegal. Basically every DVD and Blu-ray disc implements those, so every backup copy we make is illegal even though it should be covered by fair use.
They stripped us of our rights and made protecting our purchases illegal through the back door, so we have the moral obligation to ignore that law.