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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."
I wish I had an awesome teacher like that. Going into the movie theater in the name of education to capture a clip in the discussion about:
"the use of special effects in modern star trek movie VS the original movies."
That and a > 9000 word essay.
It might help if we didn't call it "ripping."
How much longer before the MPAA becomes irrelevant and we can just ignore their antics?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If only someone would propose a bill that would allow camcording in theaters for editorial use, pointing to the example the media companies gave as evidence for the necessity of the inclusion...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Haven't we been saying this for, like, ten years. The fact that an increasing number of consumers are becoming aware of said tactics doesn't seem to have:
a) impacted on those tactics
b) changed legislative backing for the MPAA
c) reduced political complicity in the whole sorry affair
Sure it will change eventually, but soon?
I just finished ripping my somewhat meager DVD collection (~ 100 titles) to disk. Guess I should start over and use a camcorder this time around...
On a more serious note - this really is getting absurd. Even with good care DVDs get scratched. I had to run a couple of mine through a Skip Doctor before they'd play without errors (as an aside: that's a pretty nifty device). But frankly the "backing up" aspect of all this is secondary - I'm ripping my DVDs because it's a heck of a lot more convenient to manage my library of purchased DVDs this way. Now I can take advantage of some great free software (pyTivo, streambaby) and watch whichever one I want using my Tivo remote - no more digging through the DVD rack looking for one particular movie.
There's just no way I'm going to let these dinosaurs tell me what I can and can't do with my own stuff.
#DeleteChrome