Error 0x80030309 : Copy Protection Error

Scenario : You recently bought a DVD and want to copy it to your PC cos you want a backup BUT you are unable to copy the contents as you keep getting the Error : “Error 0x80030309 : Copy Protection Error”. What do you do ??

Solution : This is a very common Error you get when you try to copy contents of a Copyrighted DVD. It is because of a Method called Content Scramble System (CSS) which is used to encrypt the DVD’s to prevent their contents from being copied.

A little History, CSS is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system employed on almost all commercially produced DVD-Video discs and was developed primarily by Matsushita and Toshiba, introduced in 1996. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm. However, in October 1999, the CSS algorithm was cracked and posted on the Internet, triggering endless controversies and legal battles

Not much has changed since that time as the manufacturers of DVD players and the producers of DVDs have to maintain compatibility with the vast amount of material released and changing and adding to this encryption scheme would render a lot of current titles unplayable. The computer program capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc is called DeCSS

Enough Jibber – Jabber, I own the DVD and i want a Backup….what do i do ?? OK, To the point…to do so we are going to use a freeware Software called ” DVD Shrink ” [ See Wikipedia Link here ]

DVD Shrink is a free software application that allows you to backup your DVD disks.You can use this software in conjunction with DVD burning software of your choice, to make a backup copy of any DVD video disk. Do note that DVD Shrink does not burn DVDs! The output from DVD Shrink is saved as files on your hard drive, which you can then burn to a DVD-R using separate burning software, such as the software provided with your DVD-R drive.

DVD Shrink is very useful because normally most DVD’s prevent you from making copies either by encryption(CSS) or making it so large that they are hard to fit on onto a single recordable DVD-R disk.

DVD Shrink overcomes these problems with built-in decryption algorithms(DeCSS) and by modifying or “shrinking” the data from your original DVD. (In my Experiment, it reduced 7.2GB  to 4.35GB in about 22 minutes, of course half of it was the encryption data but still it counts!!! )

And did i mention that it was FREEEE!!

[ Download DVD Shrink 3.2.0.15 ]