said by fiberguy :

to this day, distributing copyrighted material is not legal.

said by funchords :

That's simply not true, either.

said by MrMoody :

No, and no. The DMCA doesn't trump fair use (yet), and doesn't prohibit the actual breaking of copy protection (yet). It only prohibits distributing technology to do it with.

In any case many public domain DVDs aren't encrypted anyway.

said by jmuskratt :

Yes, using DeCSS, which you need to rip a DVD, does.

17 USC Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems

(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

said by jmuskratt :

Again, not entirely correct.

Making a backup copy for personal use *may be* legal fair use.

Using DeCSS to break the protection to make that copy, violates the DMCA.

So, if your Adam 12 DVDs didn't have CSS, then you'd be ok. Now whether there'll ever be a prosecution for using AnyDVD or DVD43, I can't say. The DMCA, however, does render otherwise legal fair use into banditry.

From UNIVERSAL CITY v REIMERDES:

We know of no authority for the proposition that fair use, as protected by the Copyright Act, much less the Constitution, guarantees copying by the optimum method or in the identical format of the original. Although the Appellants insisted at oral argument that they should not be relegated to a "horse and buggy" technique in making fair use of DVD movies,36 the DMCA does not impose even an arguable limitation on the opportunity to make a variety of traditional fair uses of DVD movies, such as commenting on their content, quoting excerpts from their screenplays, and even recording portions of the video images and sounds on film or tape by pointing a camera, a camcorder, or a microphone at a monitor as it displays the DVD movie. The fact that the resulting copy will not be as perfect or as manipulable as a digital copy obtained by having direct access to the DVD movie in its digital form, provides no basis for a claim of unconstitutional limitation of fair use. A film critic making fair use of a movie by quoting selected lines of dialogue has no constitutionally valid claim that the review (in print or on television) would be technologically superior if the reviewer had not been prevented from using a movie camera in the theater, nor has an art student a valid constitutional claim to fair use of a painting by photographing it in a museum. Fair use has never been held to be a guarantee of access to copyrighted material in order to copy it by the fair user's preferred technique or in the format of the original.

said by RadioDoc :

It is not 'cracking technology' though according to Real. It allows a 'fair use' transfer from one media to another, not the creation of another copy of the work. This is some murky (and deep) water.