Yeah, good luck finding commercial material out there without copyright protection on it. 
You might be able to find some stuff on Itunes, I dunno much about that.
Not copyright, everything has copyright - Digital Rights Management, encryption.
Maybe what he should do is just rip a byte for byte copy to his HD and burn a DVD when his original craps out. That should be legal enough. Keep those receipts for when the man comes knocking on your door

Reading the original post:
Burn the DVDs down as disk images you can mount on your laptop. Should work fine although each will be whatever the size of the original disc is - 3GB+.
Here's a nice run through for windows 7 if you need it.
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2009/04/13/burn-iso-images-natively-in-windows-7.aspxIt seems there's no native way to burn directly to a HD? Thanks Microsoft! And you can't mount an ISO image natively in Windows? Someone tell me that's not the case... Now I'll have to go try it but I'm still running XP - maybe that's cleaned up in 7?So, back to the important stuff - Nero, Roxio or any iso/img recorder that will let you burn to your HD should work but you might need another program to mount the image.
Take it easy out there, stay safe and thanks!