I was talking with a colleague on Friday about the legality of backing up a video found online to an internal server as a safeguard for still being able to view the film in a class setting even if the network, or the film’s server, goes down when one is planning to use it. While it is not entirely the same situation, the first item on the Copyright Office’s list of exemptions from DCMA copying restrictions certainly suggests that doing so is not inconsistent with the Copyright Office’s interpretation of fair use:
Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.
Other entries on the list of note include permission to break protection if the hardware it is on is obsolete, if the protections make the material inaccessible to the visually impaired, or if the purpose of the circumvention is to do security research.