Oh, legal, legal, legal! I swear! Is following the system of laws that keeps our democracy in place all that you care about?

It is?

Good. Just checking. My iPhone currently has three movies on it, and none of them are available for legal download anywhere. This leads some people to conclude that I in fact downloaded them illegally, from any one of hundreds of naughty file-sharing sites.

Nope. And I'll tell you why I didn't: Downloading copyrighted material without paying for it is just plain wrong. I say this without sarcasm, jokes, or subtle winks. If you want it, you have to buy it; in many cases, you can record a show off the TV.

Once you've obtained a legal copy of the movie (or TV show, or cartoon, or ...), you have every right to make a copy that you can play on your iPhone. U.S. copyright law outlines several scenarios under which you can duplicate copyrighted material and it's right there in black and white: If you own it, you can copy it from one medium (such as a DVD) to another (such as a movie file). So it's all perfectly legal.

Pretty much.

As far as anyone can tell.

The only problem is that there's this other bit of the law, added in the Nineties, which says that if a publisher has put some sort of mojo on the recording to prevent copying, then it's illegal to break that copy protection. So on the one hand, the law says you have every right to copy that movie; on the other hand, it says that you're not really allowed to exercise that right.

So which part of the law wins? We dunno. A law hasn't received its official bar mitzvah until it's been tested in court, and either upheld or overturned. The very last thing the recording industry wants is for a judge to explicitly rule that a consumer has the right to copy a DVD onto an iPod and thus it's disinclined to truly test the extent of its legal protection.

Naturally, the very last thing that the entertainment industry wants is for a judge to explicitly underscore consumers' rights to copy movies regardless of the publisher's desire, so it's never dared do anything about any DVD copying done at the consumer level.

Instead, the entertainment industry has focused its legal efforts on preventing companies from distributing software that breaks the encryption on commercial discs. But where there's a will — or a world of people with empty iPhones, iPods, and other video players — there's a way.

The great friend to the freedom-loving proletariat is a free app, available for both Windows and the Mac OS, known as HandBrake.

It's nearly impossible for the entertainment industry to shut this app down (as it has so successfully with so many other such apps) because — and get this — no one company owns it or profits from it. It's "open source" software, which means that it's built, maintained, updated, and distributed by the worldwide community of software developers. You might as well try to sue the stink off a donkey; it's everywhere and nowhere, so there's no real target.

You can download a copy of HandBrake for either Windows or Mac from the app's official site: http://handbrake.fr.

Figure 4.1. SlySoft's AnyDVD tames even the most savagely copy-protected commercial DVD.

Both versions share the same user interface. And thanks to the entertainment industry's meddling, they share the same limitation: They can only rip DVDs that haven't been copy-protected. If you want to rip a DVD that you burned with a DVD recorder, HandBrake can convert the disc's contents to movie files unaided. If you want to rip the commercial movie you bought last week, you'll need a little helper app to handle the descrambling.

All righty. Good news, sensation-seekers, because SlySoft (www.slysoft.com) has come to the rescue with a rather simple and awesome little app: AnyDVD. It'll cost you €49 (at this writing) but it's a magical app and it's well-worth the dough, even if Euro-pean dough has funny colors.

AnyDVD does one thing. It does it well, and it does it invisibly: It breaks the copyprotection on commercial DVDs and bam-boozles Windows into thinking it's just an ordinary, plane-Jane disc.

Figure 4.2. HandBrake in action

For the sake of completeness, and to take advantage of the lovely color layout of this book, I'll go ahead and show you what Any-DVD looks like. Take a gander at Figure 4-1.

This is the window that comes up if you click on the little cartoon fox that AnyDVD puts in your system tray. But honestly, it's just there to satisfy your curiosity and to confirm that it's working. Whenever you insert a DVD, AnyDVD grabs it before Windows or any other app ever sees it. It silently performs the mojo required to break the copy-protection on the disc, and then it presents it to the operating system.

From that point onward, any time any app makes a request for some of the data on the DVD, it goes through AnyDVD. It decrypts the data and passes it along to the app that wanted it, without the app's knowledge. It's as though Pixar decided to actually, you know, trust you by selling you a copy of the Incredibles without any copy protection to begin with.

The Mac edition of HandBrake used to be an all-in-one solution. But its open-source developers chose to break out the DVD-ripping portion of the app, just to make it invulnerable to lawsuits.

The good news: The change amounts to a small inconvenience, nothing more. Whereas the Windows folks need to shell out €49 for a commercial tool, Mac users need only head to www.videolan.org/ vlc and download a free copy of VLC Player. It's an impressive video player in its own right but for our purposes, we love it because it contains a code library for decrypting DVDs. You don't even need to launch VLC Player; HandBrake knows where that code library is and loads it in when you ask it to rip a commercial DVD.

There's a second option and it's yet another open-source software project: Fairmount, a free download from www.metakine.com/products/ fairmount. It works like AnyDVD. With Fairmount installed and running, any DVD you insert will be intercepted and then decrypted on the fly. The OS will then treat it like a normal, unencrypted DVD. You can even drag its contents to another hard drive, straight from the Finder.

We're all now on the same page. We all have HandBrake running on our computers and have it capable of converting commercial discs. Figure 4-2 shows you the Mac version of HandBrake; I'm using it for all the examples that follow.

Converting a DVD just takes four steps:

If you've recently bought a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, now's a good time to go back to the store and exchange it for a 10,000-piece one. Using HandBrake's default iPhone settings, converting a DVD to a movie file can take as long as two or three times the running time of the actual film. If you're running HandBrake on one of those ultra-affordable Windows notebooks with a CPU made from the same sort of stuff that goes into a Cheez-It cracker ... well, suffice to say that the sequel to this movie will be in theaters by the time HandBrake is finished.

HandBrake will end the process by making a snarky comment about how long it took to finish the conversion. Pretend not to be annoyed and you're finished: Just drag the file into your iTunes library and presto, it can be synced to your iPhone without any further ado.

The neat thing about HandBrake's iPhone setting is that it's truly one-stop shopping. All the decisions have been made for you and the only thing you really need to do is figure out whether you'd prefer to pace fit-fully or fretfully while your computer works on the problem.

But it has plenty of little tweaks, options, and settings, proving once again that life is a banquet and that we have but to take our seats and dig in:

Figure 4.3. Choosing an alternative audio track

So if the movie industry has taken such great pains to prevent you from copying DVDs, why is it so bloody easy?

Oh, you'll love this: because the movie industry was way, way too secretive when its minions developed the encryption method.

The counterintuitive thing about developing a brand-new encryption scheme is that the very last thing you want to do is perform your work in secret. You want to share your efforts with the crypto community at every stage, and allow as many people as possible to peer at it from every conceivable angle. In short: You want people to try to break it early on, before you commit to this system and you've lost the ability to make it stronger.

But no, the same industry that thought that remaking the Oscar-winning All the King's Men was a good idea also thought that developing an encryption scheme behind closed doors would work gang-busters. And sure enough, within a year, weaknesses were found, published, and widely exploited.

If Wile E. Coyote had gone for his MBA instead of spending all that dough on Acme merchandise, then surely he'd be a high-ranking executive with the Motion Picture Association of America.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a four-hour train ride tomorrow, and HandBrake has just finished converting the original, non- hideous version of All the King's Men.