It never used to be a crime. Bastard lobbyists!
Technically Step 2 should be legal, as covered by the old VCR case law (I think it involved Sony). Making a backup of a VHS tape or audio casette was legal, thus it should be legal for other formats, also.
However the sneaky bastards then went and lobbied for a law that makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. So, there shouldn't be anything wrong with writing the raw files to a drive, but if you have to crack the DRM to get the files to play then you're definitely doing something unlawful.
Disclaimer: "should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my comment lol what I say is not in any way legal advice. Also, it could be that the VHS law was more about "time-shifting", ie recording live TV so that you could watch it at a more convenient time.
Copyright also used to only be a civil offense, meaning law enforcement wouldn't come after you, but a rightsholder might. However, they lobbied over that as well and ended up with a relatively low bar - if the value is over something like $1,000 then it's automatically considered commercial and "criminal" copyright infringement.
Yeah I know what you mean. I was mainly referring to the capability to play videos. Obviously, extensions enhance functionality, but they don't really make videos load quicker or in higher quality.
Recently they added a request to download an extension to your browser, for optimal perfomance and better quality.
Like I say, I don't know what site or service they're referring to, but this was the claim about what the extension was for.
I'm sure there could be an extension that checked IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes, but that doesn't seem to be what this is. Frankly, as a rule of thumb I wouldn't download any extension from a pirate streaming website.
Later in the day, some farmers managed to get inside the market complex. Police arrested dozens, taking the total number arrested at Rungis on Wednesday to 79.
Many of thesewere arrested for breaking and entering/trespassing, not for obstructing the road. It isn't clear from the article how many if any were arrested for the road block.
When groups like Extinction Rebellion block the roads it's wrong, but when farmers do it it's ok?
I don't know what you mean by the movie web app site, but yeah that extension does sound dodgy. "Optimal performance and better quality" sounds like something a spyware vendor would say to try and get people to download, I can't think of any valid technical reason a browser extension would enable functionality beyond that which the browser already has.
In the UK it's either Amazon vans or unmarked vans (eg a self employed person who is contracted by Amazon and uses their own vehicle).
No idea whether or not it was a branded truck (it was a while ago), but it wasn't under any other sort of brand - Amazon deliveries are done by people employed by or directly contracted for Amazon.
I didn't have that issue, I think uMatrix gobbled up the thing.
There are an awful lot of 3rd party scripts from many domains.
Pretty sure it was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. Sony were actually the defendant, with their Betamax format. It does seem to focus primarily on time-shifting, ie recording live to watch later, however the reason for this was that the content was already available to the viewer and thus the copying should be permitted fair use. The Supreme Court also quoted Mr Rogers' testimony in their ruling.
Applying this reasoning to new technologies has since been debated back and forth through the decades with little clear resolution. Subsequent cases have sided with the rightsholders (eg against Grokster and Limewire), but the reasoning behind them was all over the place. They addressed the purpose of file sharing technology and concluded that those services existed primarily to facilitate copyright infringement, rather than addressing the matter of personal backups.