This was during an era where VHS was standard and DVD’s were just brand new at the time (before streaming sites existed). Chains like Blockbuster were booming back then with people renting movies or even TV shows for a fee but have to return them by an expected date, what happens is that in order to “keep” a copy, people would use a PC with disc burning software to burn the contents from that DVD onto a blank one.
Know those blank white DVDs? Basically those were used on storing a “pirated” disc for themselves before returning the rented copy back at the video rental store. When I was a kid, I remember encountering what clearly a pirated copy of The Prince of Egypt (so who ever pirated it kept the rented copy) since the disc art is crappy & low quality (it’s been printed then glued onto a blank DVD used for copying upon peeling it off).
Yeah I’d rent things and copy. But blank VHS tapes or DVD-R discs were definitely not free.
With VHS, you had to own two VHS players, one to play and one to record and they were kind of semi luxury items, at least early on, and analog copying significantly reduced quality so it often wasn’t worth it.
With DVD, one DVD player can be just a player and one a read/writer. And writers and discs were very expensive and until later, the discs were write once. So, of it fails part way, you waste a disc. Also, the encryption on DVDs was an issue for a while, but the key was cracked and eventually software became common. Though the DMCA made it illegal to bypass the encryption with pretty significant penalties even for a single one whereas VHS there were just laws relayed to copying that have less possible penalties than bypassing encryption, despite those FBI warnings.
But, yeah, every time I rented something I liked I would try to copy it when I had the hardware to do it. And when Netflix started, I copied a lot of those DVDs before returning them.