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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."
Nah, can't do that, teacher might use the camcorder to videotape students in the locker room.
Now I know what that guy was doing behind me while I was watching Star Trek yesterday. He was just making a clip for fair use.
According to the MPAA, it is a-okay to use a camcorder to record a movie!
requiring you to defend yourself from a wild boar with a knife, even if you have a gun, just because it is not legal to have a gun where you live. (Even if you don't happen to have a knife.)
BTW, like the MPAA, wild boars are vicious.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Given the technology skills most my teachers have had I can see them trying to put the dvd inside a photocopier and hoping for the best. Your average teacher couldn't rip a DVD, and why bother when you can just get any notable clip you want off youtube. Go fight with Google MPAA.
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It might help if we didn't call it "ripping."
Teachers may also make partial copies of a CD for education purposes by recording to a vinyl record and playing it back on a phonograph.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
ThePirateBay.org registers the domain TheTeacherBay.org
One would expect the MPAA to suggest teachers use pantomime since this would please both themselves and the RIAA.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I'm glad for ridiculous crap like this, because the more groups that end up on the target list of the MAFIAA's tactics, the sooner something will be done to redress the abuses of our society and our freedoms they have perpetuated in the name of copyright.
People apparently have to feel the heat themselves in order to see the wrong in the MAFIAA's ways.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Talk is cheap. How are they going to back it up? It's not like they can walk onto school grounds and force teachers to abide by this arbitrary policy that has no legal weight whatsoever.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
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.
How much longer before the MPAA becomes irrelevant and we can just ignore their antics?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Of course, you could just describe it as "to increase the cost of a teacher playing a DVD in a classroom for legally-permitted educational purposes" and get straight to the point...
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
until Star.Trek.(2009).Mr.BeRNaRD.3rdPeRIod.SoCiALSTudiES.avi hits the scene.
Or costs quite as much to get rid of.
http://transformativeworks.org/
Strictly speaking, at least in the US, there is a significant difference between a "rip" and a "backup". By "rip" it is almost always meant a video file produced by breaking CSS and re-encoding the contents of the DVD. That would fall foul of the DMCA(which sucks; but it is pretty clear).
A "backup" would just be a copy, bit-for-bit of the DVD, which the MPAA and friends obviously don't want you to make, and you would probably get in trouble for distributing; but in no way violates the DMCA. (incidentally, this part is why DVD piracy started well before CSS was broken. Since anybody with a DVD player can decode CSS crippled disks, a pirate simply has to clone the disk, not break the crypto)
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
Teachers could carve each frame into a clay tablet and let it dry in the sun. Then mount the clay tablets on big wooden wheel and spin it real fast.
Time to put an end to chucklehead organizations like the MPAA, BSA and RIAA. Companies are trying to be heavy-handed with their customers while letting some vaporous organization take the heat for their dickish behavior. Implement joint and several liability on the member companies for the actions of their enforcement organizations and this silly business will end overnight.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If NEA is as powerful as many around here think it is, the recording industry is going down.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Except that currently available DVD burners don't burn the part of the disk where the keys are stored, so the (encrypted) backup won't play in a DVD player.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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?
If you watch the History channels very, very early in the morning, you'll find that they run a show with less/no commercials to make room before the top of the hour. During that time, they have a History Classroom or something show (seriously - that's not my best time of day, so I apologize for inaccuracies).
One thing I noticed - there's a screen that gives instructions to teachers that they have to delete any video recordings they've made of the show after a certain date - I recall, sleepily - that it's within a year or something.
Now - how does history go stale in a year?
I did a lot of digging to find the food chain on this one... History is the Classroom ties into Cable in the Classroom. Here's what they have to say:
http://www.history.com/global/feedback/faq.jsp?NetwCode=THC&level_1=nodes_54224&level_2=nodes_54240&level_3=nodes_54297&x=35&y=11
http://www.ciconline.org/faq#Copyright
http://www.ciconline.org/copyright
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml
Now, color me naive - but that's the beginning of the foodchain for a teacher to BEGIN to simply videotape something related to history of educational value to show to their students. I quote - and I am not making this up:
What's an educator to do? Read Education World's five-part series on copyright, fair use, and new technologies, that's what! We did the work so you wouldn't have to!
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280a.shtml
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280b.shtml
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280c.shtml
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280d.shtml
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280e.shtml
In an age where our test scores show we're failing, with teachers overburdened like never before - related to a show that a kid can just watch at home without encumbrances (should his/her parents **be there** for the kid with this kind of info) - note what the teacher has to go through.
As opposed to just taping it and working it into the lesson plan - because it comes from a place called the History Channel - tied to Cable in the Classroom - where "cable" is that thing usually subsidized by local communities as a near utility.
Thanks, copyright eagles. Thanks a lot.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
We can't have teachers ripping DVD-quality clips all willy-nilly. Why, if someone got ahold of enough teachers, he could put all their clips together and re-create the original movie! In digital DVD quality! You pirates will surely roast in hell for even considering it.
I suggest you try playing a 20 second clip from the middle of a commercial DVD sometime to see how practical it is. Thanks to the inclusion of unskippable logos, trailers and informative films telling you how downloading music is stealing and makes you a criminal, it takes forever to actually get to the content. Whoever came up with the idea of locking DVD player controls should be made to try to start up Toy Story for an audience of 100 impatient toddlers and see how good an idea it seems then.
We could insist that all educational DVD players don't implement these controls, but then that would break the DMCA and we're back to square one.
Who is that, a French porn star? The phrase you are looking for is je ne sais quoi.
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
mplayer dvd://1 -ss 1090 -endpos 20
Seems to work well enough.
Sorry LainTouko, still breaking the DMCA with that one so you might as well have an exception to the DMCA. (Much like they are trying to do.)
Command line mplayer is probably beyond your average 7th period drama teacher as well.
Okay, I'm pretty sure a movie theater screen was involved, rather than a television set, but the basic mechanism is essentially the same.
I was only pursuing an education, honest! It's not fair - Obi-Wan trained Anakin Skywalker, but he wouldn't train me. I have to get my force training somewhere, don't I?
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