Making a copy for yourself of something you already legally have, is allowed under copyright law. (So you can make copies of the DVD for personal use while keeping the original safe from wear, damage or loss)

There are laws like the DMCA that ban you from circumventing copy protection. So if you have to circumvent some copy protection first to copy the DVDs, then you break the DMCA or similar law if such exists in your country. However you don't break the copyright law

About the latter i can only say, that its no one's business what you do with your DVDs within your private territory (i mean, without putting out copies that are illegal under the copyright law). For anyone to find out that you broke the DMCA, you have to either use software that betrays you - which you don't, or it means that somebody physically intruded into your territory or broke into your computer to check on you, which is entirely different level of crime than copying a DVD

Whether it is legal to copy a DVD I don't know, it may well be, but the manufacturers put so much copy protection on them that it is next to impossible without specialist software, which, being Windows, comes at a price  

It is also difficult to make backup copies sometimes. We have a couple of Sony HDD recorders for recording programmes off air. They record to an internal hard drive, but there is no DVD or Blu-Ray disc slot to copy them to. There is a USB port into which you can plug an external additional HDD and copy stuff to that, but doing so ties the additional HDD to that recorder only and it cannot be used on any other device, even another HDD recorder of the same make and model.

Legal it may be, but it's [censored] difficult  

Legalities of copying media are different for each country.

I have also found another wrinkle in this discussion: We have ripped most of our DVDs and many Blu-Ray we own to data and stored it on a home network streaming server (in USA this is legal).
We used to be able to play this content back on any of our Blu-Ray players that are network connected, which is 1 Sony and 2 Samsungs. Initially all was well, but SONY implemented an OTA FW update to our 1 Sony BD player and it won't stream ANY of our media that is now owned by Sony. Apparently the Sony DRM software running on Sony smart devices compares whatever you are watching, from a disc, USB or network media server and checks it against Sony's online database. It uses the audio and video, so any media that has no DRM is still subject to Sony DRM. If it matches a Sony title with the Sony online database, it stops the playback. One way around it is to turn off the Wi-Fi to the Sony BD player. Irritating because I actually have those movies on disc, I just wanted them all in a media library so we could choose our movies at a whim.

With the rise of companies attempting to limit your choices on what you can do with software and media. Also comes the rise of "pirates", pirate radio stations and hackers who free said media from copy protections and time limitations and once more restore the old timey ideas of worry free media.

I like to think of them as the freedom fighters of the internet rather than dirty pirates set to "steal" profits from "innocent" corporations just trying to make "A BUCK".

(Same corporations that simultaneously screw artists out of their own work and sue up and coming artists for plagiarism after GIVING THEM PERSMISSON in the first place to use certain audio clips) why would a corporation sue after GIVING permission? Well obviously if someone becomes successful with whatever work they made the CORPORATION WANTS A CUT. aka 100% of the cut. I'm specifically referring to The Verves Bitter Sweet Symphony and how Abkco sued them after the song became popular. But there is plenty of examples.