You have a right to fair uses of a DVD, but there's no legal way to get that access. This is a surprisingly accurate paraphrase of the decision of the US District Court for the Northern District of California in the case of 321 Studios v. MGM Studios.
The case involves the infamous "anticircumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), chiefly 17 USC §1201(a)(2), which states in part that "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof that is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work." In short, if something is encrypted and its contents copyrighted, it’s illegal to make or sell anything that provides access to the underlying content. 321 Studios sells software that allows DVD owners to make a backup copy of discs they own, onto either a CD-R or DVD-R disc, without the CSS (Content Scrambling System) encryption present on nearly all DVD releases from the major studios. Back in 2002, 321 Studios asked a court to rule that their software did not violate 17 USC §1201(a)(2) and §1201(b)(1) (which is worded very similarly to §1201(a)(2)) and that such provisions were beyond Congress' authority to enact.
The District Court ruled "the purchase pf a DVD does not give the purchaser the authority of the copyright holder to decrypt CSS" The decision goes on to state "a simple reading of the statute makes it clear that is prohibition applies to the manufacturing, trafficking in and making of devices that would circumvent encryption technology, not to the uses of such technology."
This is effectively saying that while DVD purchasers have the fair use right to make a single backup copy of the disc, but cannot make anything that would bypass the encryption, and would not be able to purchase a legal application or device to decrypt it, since selling or trafficking in such software or devices is a violation of the DMCA. You have a right to fair use, but no right to gain access to the content you need for any fair use.
In May of last year, I served on a panel testifying before the Library of Congress (LOC) in regards to these very same issues (the LOC has the authority to grant exemptions to parts of §1201 for specific classes of work). Supporting an exemption for DVD backup copies was Stevan Mitchell of 321 Studios; on the opposing side were representatives from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Time Warner, all of whom addressed the issue in one form or another. The DVD CCA, MPAA and Time Warner reps all paid lip service to fair use, claiming that no matter what sort of restrictions were in place, one could always make fair use of the content on that disc.
On the surface, that seems reasonable; the most common fair usage of movies include showing small bits of it for criticism and reference. These are not the only fair uses, though, especially considering that there is nothing that defines what constitutes a fair use. The courts are supposed to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a given use of a work is fair use. This means that entirely new uses for things can be found, and be found to be fair uses. But with the DMCA's prohibitions on gaining access to a copyrighted work, it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to find a new and creative fair use for a work and not be in violation of one or more of the circumvention prohibition provisions of the DMCA.
The court's decision in this case is a major blow for fair use; the ruling says that fair uses are legal, but the methods of gaining access to perform these fair uses are not. I must ask: what good is a billion dollars in a chest if you can’t get the chest open? What good is the ability to have fair uses if there’s no legal way to get to the content?