I think you'll find the publishers have it pretty well figured out. Apple and Sony and Microsoft and Amazon etc. and everybody else in the production and distribution world have collaborated on standards for digital rights management, and built limits into the firmware and software to protect their copyrights and distribution business. They've also invested heavily in aggressive legal strategies to enforce it. You really can't blame them -- with lossless digital copying they'd have every kid with a computer ripping them off if it was easy. (Not that a lot of them haven't been successful).

Unless you've subscribed, rented or purchased with rights to copy -- about the only way for the non-hacker to make a copy is to convert it back to analog -- play it on the screen and "film" the screen while using the headphone jack on the playback device as a microphone input to the recording camera. Analog to analog. You'd lose a lot of your time and in the process the sound/video quality would suffer greatly but it might be OK for home viewing on a small screen with one or two speakers. (Note: I'm not advocating illegal copies.)