If you have a camcorder that has pass-thru capabilties, that might work. I have occasionally used my Sony pd150 and feed s-video or composite input and audio from a vhs tape deck then take the firewire pass-thru output of the camcorder in to my sony dhr1000 deck and it will record the signal. It seems that camcorder somehow strips the protection.
Of course, it all depends on the protection scheme I guess. If you have a camcorder with pass-thru, it might be worth a try.