Fair Use advocates, take notice. Circuit City is apparently putting its neck on the line to provide customers with DVD transfer services. The company is offering a "DVD video transfer service" that for all intents and purposes is illegal. The company will take commercial DVDs and rip them for use on portable devices for $10 for 1 DVD, $20 for 3 DVDs or $30 for 5 DVDs. That is, until their legal department hears what's happening.

The DMCA, of course, makes this illegal. Even if fair use clearly provides users the "right" to make backup and private transformative copies of works that they have purchased, the DMCA itself makes it illegal to circumvent encrypted access controls for any reason not allowed for by the Library of Congress. If Circuit City hasn't received a cease and desist, they will soon.

It's a real shame, too, because this should be a viable market. Software and services are losing out to draconian digital rights management philosophies and anti-consumer technologies aimed at increasing revenues stemming from double-dippingwhat I call the industry's penchant for charging twice for the same thing. While charging $10 to rip a single DVD is pricey, if there was a market for DVD copying software, there would be competition, too. But since 321 Studios' DVD X Copy and DVD Copy Plus software was found to violate the DMCA, such software has been effectively banned from US retailers. A plethora of software is available for copying DVDs online, but all of it is technically illegal to use the United States.

The situation is especially frustrating because challenging the status quo in court has been difficult. When 321 Studios had their day in court, we hoped that DVD copying would be affirmed. Sadly, it wasn't. Judge Susan Illston put aside the questions of fair use and instead focused on the legality of 321 Studios' actions. "Legal downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense to the software manufacturer's violation of the provisions (of copyright law)," she wrote.

According to a promotional plaque photographed by a Consumerist reader, Circuit City requires that transfers come "from an original copy of your DVD collection," but they have no way of verifying that. Even if they could, we don't expect the MPAA to care. We all know that as far as the MPAA and its members are concerned, the best solution is the one in which customers buy separate copies of movies for their TVs and their portable media players. Circuit City's moves are welcome, but unfortunately doomed unless the retailer decides to stick to its guns.

Update: Bill Cimino from Circuit City?s corporate offices has confirmed to Ars Technica that this service was actually not offered by Circuit City officially, and that the signage was not accurate nor was it authorized.