DMCA anticircumvention question
I am not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV. But I have a legal question if there's a DMCA expert floating around out there.
Suppose that I own a huge collection of DVDs (as many of us do), and I want to back them up onto a big hard drive. This is purely because (a) sometimes it is more convenient to watch a DVD on my laptop and the hard drive takes less power than the DVD player; and (b) I have small children and I want to have a backup in case they scratch the original.
In other words, I want to exercise my traditional fair-use rights to make a backup copy.
DVDs contain both access control and copy control technology, and the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent those--thus preventing me from exercising my fair-use rights. However, the technology to perform the circumvention is readily available to anyone with access to an Internet search engine. So the only barrier is legal, not technical.
(I'm going to ignore the fact that it is very unlikely that I would be prosecuted for breaking the DMCA purely to exercise my fair-use rights--the PR nightmare for the movie industry would far outweigh the zero financial benefit they could hope to gain from such an action. Some people--not me--might even welcome such a lawsuit, since the publicity could help turn political tides against the more onerous provisions of the DMCA.)
So here are my questions:
Does the DMCA outlaw the possession of a fair-use copy produced through circumvention, or merely the act of circumventing the copy and access controls?
This is an important question because if only the act of circumvention is illegal, then if I can find a way to legally circumvent the copy and access controls (see below), I can keep my backup copies legally.
Assuming that the answer to question (1) is that only the act of circumvention is illegal: Can I physically transport my DVDs and computer to a jurisdiction where the DMCA does not apply (for example, a foreign-flagged cruise ship on the high seas, or the nation of Lower Slobovokistan), make my backups there, then return to the U.S. with the original DVDs and the backup copies? Or would U.S. law bar the entry of a fair-use backup onto U.S. soil?
Would it be legal to ship my collection of DVDs to another country with no DMCA-equivalent, where a service bureau would perform the circumvention and create backups, then ship them back to me? (of course, this would probably be more expensive than just buying new DVDs)
Finally, assume that it is legal to possess a fair-use backup of a copy/access controlled DVD, and that I made backups of my DVDs in another jurisdiction where it is legal. If the DMCA police discover my hard drive of backups, is the burden of proof on me to prove that I actually made the backups in Lower Slobovokistan, or is the burden of proof on the DMCA police to show that the act of circumvention actually occurred on U.S. soil?
I'm asking these questions mostly out of academic curiosity, though the fact is that I do own a bunch of DVDs I would like to have backups of. Depending on the answers, though, I could see an interesting new niche for cruise ship operators.