DVD stands (originally) for Digital Video Disc, or officially, Digital Versatile Disc. It was created as a high-density data medium for movie storage and playback within the home. The specifications for the format are released and maintained by the DVD Forum, which is a cartel of hardware manufacturers and other corporations with an interest in the digital entertainment content industry. A DVD is a 120mm optical disk, very similar in appearance to the earlier Compact Disc format. They key differences between DVD and CD are a much higher data density, and the ability to record up to two data layers per side of the disk.

DVD comes in a number of physical formats and sizes used for a variety of different purposes. The format usually used for movie releases is known as a DVD-ROM (Read Only Memory) indicating that data can only be read from the disk, not written to it. A number of slightly different technologies make recordable DVDs available. These include:

• DVD-ROM Read Only Memory, which is typically stamped in a DVD press, not burnt, and can only be read from.
  Any mass-produced DVD title is on a DVD-ROM disk;
• DVD±R Recordable, which can usually be written to once in a long, continuous write in a DVD burner;
• DVD±RW Re-Writable, which are disks that are rated to be burned up to 100 times;
• DVD-RAM Random Access Memory, which can be used almost like a portable hard disk, with any one spot on the disk surface rated to be written to up to 100,000 times.

There are a number of additional formats with slight variations from these main types.The old Compact Disc (CD) format originally had 640 MB of storage space, which was later upgraded to 700MB as manufacturing technology matured. DVD comes in a number of different sizes starting at 4.37GB, differentiated by a simple numerical suffix, roughly derived from the data capacity of each, as shown below:

Almost every movie DVD-ROM is a DVD-9, and the vast majority of blank DVD±Rs are DVD-5s. This creates a hurdle for anyone who wants to make a backup copy of a movie they own, as most blank media has insufficient capacity to contain the full movie.

Also note that there are also 80mm MiniDVDs, which are quite uncommon, and are beyond the scope of this guide. Apart from their lower capacity, they are functionally identical to mainstream 120mm DVDs.

To prevent trade of DVD movies throughout the world, the DVD Forum came up with a system of 8 DVD "regions", which each represent different economic and geographical areas of the world. Each disk is encoded with one or more region codes, and can only be played back in a player which is set to the corresponding region. It is possible to encode a DVD movie with several, or even every region code, thereby making it possible to play in (almost) any player.

The official explanation given was to allow, for example, the sale of a new DVD release in the US while the title was still showing in cinemas in Europe. In practice, however, the vast majority of DVDs are given region codes regardless of the age of the material, which supports the view held by critics that the whole region system is simply a way of restricting free-trade of DVDs between different economies (thereby allowing the industry to charge people in developed countries more than those in developing economies). For this reason, even after more than ten years, the subject is still a matter of legal dispute in many nations, as it is apparently in breach of WTO regulations on free-trade. Australia's and New Zealand's respective consumer affairs watchdogs have both held that the region system is in breach of the retail laws of those countries.

The DVD Region Codes are listed below:

• Region 1: Bermuda, Canada, United States
• Region 2: Middle East, Western and Central Europe, Egypt, French overseas territories, Greenland, Japan, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland
• Region 3: Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan
• Region 4: Australia, New Zealand, Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Oceania, South America
• Region 5: Africa, Former Soviet Union, India, Mongolia, North Korea
• Region 6: China
• Region 7: Reserved (found on some pre-release media)
• Region 8: International (airliners, cruise ships etc.)

To prevent copyright infringement of media distributed on DVDs (piracy), the DVD Forum came up with an encryption scheme called Content Scrambling System, or CSS. CSS is a system by which parts of a movie are encrypted using a key which is included on the DVD. By design, a DVD player, (or DVD player PC software like Win X DVD ) has the capability to decrypt the movie files on the fly with the included key, and the data is rendered useless without it. Note that all of this happens automatically within seconds whenever you put a DVD into your DVD player or play a disk from your software DVD player.

The intention behind CSS was stop people from being able to copy the movie files (known as VOBs - Video OBject files) from a DVD to a computer hard drive. Should you ever attempt to do this, you'd find that although you can successfully copy the video files from a DVD to your computer, if you attempt to play the duplicate from your hard drive, you'll notice that large swathes of the video stream have been irrevocably damaged by the encryption: The original DVD will still be fine, but you can't just copy files onto a hard drive without the correct decryption key. The CSS has long since been cracked, enabling you to make a backup of your own DVDs with appropriate software.

The origin of copyright stretches back into ancient history, however, for practical purposes, intellectual property like trademarks, patents, books, films, and other media are protected by the same basic laws that were established with the Paris Convention and Berne Convention during the late nineteenth century. These laws have changed gradually over time, however, the original intent is more or less in tact. Copyright law exists to allow the authours and creators of art to be paid for their creative effort by granting them ownership over their own work, and its derivatives - ie, copies. Copyright law applies to the electronic duplication of data on a computer just as it does to the words in a book, so before you get ripping, you should know just what your rights are as a consumer, and where they end.

The digital content industry has been enforcing their right to protect their intellectual property with extreme prejudice in recent years, by initiating costly legal action against copyright violators, suing hundreds of individuals in dozens of countries for thousands of dollars at a time. With the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) through the United States Congress, some copyright violations may actually attract criminal penalties too. US copyright laws are among the most extreme, however, similar legislation already exists, or is in the process of being entered into law in various other countries.

The law in most countries allows consumers special permission to make copies of copyrighted material for certain reasons, which are referred to collectively as Fair-Use. Fair-Use mostly concerns the use of excerpts of copyrighted material for education and research purposes (like a quote from a film or a citation in a research paper), however, it also requires that consumers be allowed to make a copy for backup purposes. This means that under copyright law, you are allowed to make a single copy of, say, a DVD that you've bought. If you later sell or give the DVD away, you're meant to destroy your backup too. If, however, your original DVD gets scratched, you can fall back onto your backup copy.

The vast majority of legal action has been initiated by the MPAA (the film industry's main lobby group) and RIAA (the music industry's counterpart) in response to pirates downloading movies and songs from Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks in the form of DVD rips and MP3s. As far as we know, no-one has ever been successfully sued for making a backup of a DVD they own. It's important to remember that laws vary from country to country though.

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