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MPAA Says Teachers Should Camcord For Fair Use
unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica piece detailing the convoluted lengths to which the MPAA will go in order to keep anybody from ripping a DVD, ever. The organization showed a film to the US Copyright Office, in the triennial hearing to spell out exemptions to the DMCA, giving instructions for how a teacher could use a camcorder to record a low-quality clip of a DVD for educational use — even though such a purpose is solidly established in law as fair use. "Never mind that this solution results in video of questionable quality and requires teachers to learn even more tech in order to get the job done. It also requires schools (or, given the way most schools are run, the teachers themselves) to incur additional costs to purchase camcorders and videotapes if they don't have them already. Add in the extra time involved, and this 'solution' is a laughably convoluted alternative to simply ripping a clip from a DVD."
In a senior year class we actually used the leaked direct feed bootleg of Episode II to compare the CG to original trilogy and discuss the evolution of technology in film.
I was one of the few people that had the pleasure (or the displeasure) of being at the Library of Congress DMCA hearing room when the MPAA made this ridiculous argument. Suffice to say, I was completely shocked, flabbergasted, and just plain insulted that educators would truly be expected to do something like this in their bizarro world. Nevermind the fact that you would need an HDTV, HD Camcorder, Tripod, good lighting, and tons of time on your hands to manually create compilation clips with your camcorder (as if educators had any free time as it is).
I couldn't tell if the Copyright bigwigs that heard the argument were actually taking it seriously, but I sincerely hope that any appearance of sincerity was simply there for the sake of keeping respect for the hearings.
The one thing that I learned at the hearing was that you have to be fucking crazy in order to be a lawyer on their side. Even I (a soon to be unemployed law school graduate) didn't think that I could make this argument with a straight face even for tons of money.
You are either trolling or seriously retarded.
Standard audio cassette tape travels at 1 7/8 ips (inches of tape per second past the heads) and is complete and total SHIT. No amount of DBS/Dolby "magic" and expensive playback electronics can fix that. Audio cassettes have the lowest fidelity of any analog format in history and only the mega-stoned could tolerate listening to them. 8-tracks ran at 3 3/4 ips. Twice as fast. That means twice the headroom, twice the high frequency information, and half the tape noise. Consumer reel-to-reel ran at 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 ips for another doubling of quality. Semi-pro machines ran at 7 1/2 and 15 ips. Pro machines ran at 15 and 30 ips. (at $200 per reel for 2" multitrack tape, studios didn't run at 30ips much, usually just for jazz and classical)
The number of heads above 3 had fuck-all to do with anything. Having separate heads for playback, recording, and erase allowed the magnetic gap to be optimized for a single task. Cassettes were 2-sided and expensive decks often had more heads but only so you didn't have to flip the tape or move the heads to play the other side. It was still a $100 saddle on a $10 horse.
Cassette tape is so insanely inferior to vinyl that I won't even dignify your comparison by responding. I'm guessing your only experience with a turntable involved mangled children's records on a battery-operated "record player" adorned with Disney characters.
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