Illustration: Joe ZeffAfter a lengthy battle for the right to back up commercial DVD movies--and for its own profits--321 Studios was slapped with injunctions by federal courts in New York and California, forcing the company to cease selling its DVD X Copy products in their existing form. The programs copied (or ripped) commercial DVD movies by defeating their copy protection scheme--a major no-no under 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The company based its defense on the long-standing precedent that people have the right to make a single backup copy of media they buy for personal use--but that argument hasn't enjoyed much favor in court so far.
Since the ruling, 321 Studios has been selling DVD Xtreme, a promising but overpriced and underpowered CD/DVD software suite that will copy only unencrypted material to either CD or DVD.
But unless you need DVD X Copy's extra-simple interface, there are better free alternatives available; a Web search will produce information on backing up your DVDs if the procedure once again becomes legal.
If you are bound and determined to spend some of your hard-earned cash, several commercial programs can shrink and copy video (keep it legal, please) to DVD once it's on your hard drive: InterVideo's DVD Copy 2 ($80) and Pinnacle Systems' much more reasonably priced InstantCopy 8 ($30), to name two. Both Roxio's Easy Media Creator 7 and Ahead's Nero 6 Ultra Edition provide their own components to compress video and to re-encode to MPEG-4 at supersmall file sizes suitable for notebook playback.
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