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."

Comments

Re:The MPAA went on to say that

[Plazmid]

Well at one point someone devised a way to store video on phonograph discs so...

Re:Photocopying

[X0563511]

I don't mean to be rude, but SSH tunnels and proxies are not that hard to handle, once you know that the tools exist.

I think the harder part is having a good server to use them on... but even then there are things you can use.

That's the problem. The information to bypass these blocks isn't hard to grasp - it's hard to find.

In an effort to help this, my solution:

SSH out to home or a free shell account. Tunnel the ports as needed. Use tinyproxy on the remote end, and set your browser to use this proxy through the tunnel.