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Limitied DVD copying to be legal in the future?

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There's a story that's light on details from Reuters that suggests that limited DVD copying will be ok in the future.  Microsoft, Disney, IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Time Warner have agreed in principle to make legal backup copies of next-generation video disks and play the content on portable devices (Portable Media Centers?).

Sounds like a great idea to me, but it's only for next-generation DVDs, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.  Given the absence of Sony from this group I suspect it's HD-DVD that's being discussed.  When this new format will actually arrive I have no idea, but the story mentions the technology being available to license later this year, which suggests we could see HD-DVDs by the end of the year or early next year?

Being able to backup copies of HD-DVDs and presumably play them on a computer would certainly encourage me to jump to the new format quicker.  It's a shame I can't already easily and legaly do this with DVDs.  One problem is going to be storage though, hard drives are going to have to get much bigger to store backups of HD-DVDs in any quantity.

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