Now suppose I invite you to my house, and we watch that DVD together.

Have I not effectively “distributed” the content to you, since your memory will now be one that has seen the movie, the songs might run through your head, and things you see or hear in life can now recall to you scenes and bits of dialogue from the movie?

seriously, modern copyright laws being put into place are not rigid.

modern copyright policy is designed for one-way flexibility. It empowers the rights holders to “decide” what is considered covered under the legislation, within the baseline boundaries in which it was created. There is absolutly no consistancy, and the consumers have to do whatever the other party decides, with no basic rights to the same flexibility as the other party. It is simply put, an unfair advantage.

The same thing is true in the US. In theory libraries and other educational institutions have the legal right to make copies of digital works for archival and other purposes, but they don’t have the right to circumvent the copy protection so they can actually copy the works.

An interesting challenge would be to start a service that converts media sent to them to any format the customer wants. You send them a DVD, they send you a XviD.

Or console modding, so people can play copied games. I bet you’re not allowed to sell mod chips, but you are apparently allowed to backup your games.

Fail.

I personally believe such a law is kept in place as a backdoor which allows (additional) accusations against suspects. Because it doesn’t matter that your computer was confiscated, let’s say, as a part of a drugraid, what matters is that there are DRM-broken materials on the PC. And even if no evidence is found about you being a druglord they still have your machine that is full of illegal stuff so they can smack you with that. Not as hard as they would have for drugtrafficing, but still.