[Jeffhs]

Macrovision is used on DVDs to prevent illegal copying. (The DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was enacted in 2000, means business, and yes, people have been arrested, fined and sent to prison for illicitly copying music CDs, downloading MP3 files, and let us not forget the illegal copying of DVDs.) Therefore, I think it would be unethical at best and illegal at worst to defeat the protection. If you want to own a movie you are renting from Netflix (for example), go out and buy the DVD--don't copy the Netflix disc. I tried the latter once with a DVD of a favorite old TV series (Quincy, M.E.) by copying several episodes to my hard drive, but my conscience bothered me for some time afterward, so I finally ordered the box set of the show's first-second and later third seasons from Amazon.com and erased the copies on the computer when the discs arrived.

I felt a lot better once the purchased discs came in my mail. While I don't think I would have been arrested for copying the Netflix disc into my computer for my own use, I realize there are laws against such copying (that FBI anti-piracy warning at the beginning of most commercial DVDs is all but impossible to ignore and, like the DMCA, means business), so I decided to play it safe and buy my own copies. Another nice thing about having the actual DVDs is that I can watch them on my TV, rather than having to be tethered to the computer.

As to the Macrovision protection being defeatable on some DVD players: if it is, I don't know how to do it with my own player and wouldn't do it even if I did know the procedure to do so. My first DVD player was a cheap CyberHome DVD-300S that did not, to the best of my knowledge, have any kind of provision for disabling Macrovision; my present player, a Memorex DVD-2042 full-size unit, does not seem to have any menu options to do this either, and I've studied the setup menus fairly carefully. I'll look at those menus again, but I'm fairly certain there is no easy way to defeat the copy protection unless one were willing to replace pre-progammed ICs in the player--I think most of the player's functions are on one large multipin IC, not unlike the huge "jungle" IC in today's televisions. There is a switch on the back of my player that turns on or off the progressive-scan mode, but I'm fairly sure as well that has nothing to do with Macrovision.