Film Professor Fights the DMCA
DMCA Restricts Education: Here's How You Can Help
My Professor Peter Decherney is currently assembling his case against the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Concisely, the DMCA makes it illegal to create digital clips from legally purchased DVDs, because doing so involves circumventing encryption software.
My film professor, who uses an abundance of film clips each class to facilitate learning, currently violates the DMCA every time he builds a new digital clip on his computer. He creates this seamless flow of images and media in order to avoid fumbling with videos and DVDs every time he wants to screen an image – he often shows up to ten clips in one class.
Clearly, in his case, as well as in many others’, the DMCA impedes classroom learning. While providing no protection against “piracy” or the illegal distribution of digital content here, the DMCA has become a burden upon the present-day educator.
The DMCA – which was created in 1998 to regulate the circumvention of digital media encryption – has provided spaces for fair use exemptions. Unfortunately, educational fair uses of the technology still do not fall under these exemptions. Thus, my professor is currently challenging the status of the DMCA, in order to assert another fair use exemption for obvious educational uses of encryption-bypassing software.
His case requires a great deal of information hunting: determining from amazon.com whether certain films have been released on DVD yet, gathering info on DVD jukeboxes, and on WB educational licensing plans, as well as a variety of other important tasks in order to assure that it will hold up in court.
In other words, if you have any extra time during the next two weeks, and the remotest investment in the stakes of education’s battle against rigid copyright legislation, please post a comment on the message boards volunteering your services, or email me at nucular.power.plant[@]gmail.com.
This is important.
My Professor Peter Decherney is currently assembling his case against the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Concisely, the DMCA makes it illegal to create digital clips from legally purchased DVDs, because doing so involves circumventing encryption software.My film professor, who uses an abundance of film clips each class to facilitate learning, currently violates the DMCA every time he builds a new digital clip on his computer. He creates this seamless flow of images and media in order to avoid fumbling with videos and DVDs every time he wants to screen an image – he often shows up to ten clips in one class.
Clearly, in his case, as well as in many others’, the DMCA impedes classroom learning. While providing no protection against “piracy” or the illegal distribution of digital content here, the DMCA has become a burden upon the present-day educator.The DMCA – which was created in 1998 to regulate the circumvention of digital media encryption – has provided spaces for fair use exemptions. Unfortunately, educational fair uses of the technology still do not fall under these exemptions. Thus, my professor is currently challenging the status of the DMCA, in order to assert another fair use exemption for obvious educational uses of encryption-bypassing software.
His case requires a great deal of information hunting: determining from amazon.com whether certain films have been released on DVD yet, gathering info on DVD jukeboxes, and on WB educational licensing plans, as well as a variety of other important tasks in order to assure that it will hold up in court.
In other words, if you have any extra time during the next two weeks, and the remotest investment in the stakes of education’s battle against rigid copyright legislation, please post a comment on the message boards volunteering your services, or email me at nucular.power.plant[@]gmail.com.This is important.
posted by maggie | 11:35 AM
3 Comments:
Count me in, friend.
We got linked at the Yale Law school:
Click here
Well, first I'd go to the EFF. Unfortunately, as a practical matter, this would run across the "trafficing" provisions--that is, you could make your own tools but never authorize others to. Not overly useful--distributing DeCSS is (and would still be) illegal. Not that that matters, now, but there's the new system on next-gen DVDs coming up...
As I recall from reading the stuff from the EFF & the people who have done this before, this rulemaking is almost worse than useless. I filed a comment myself, although I suspect it will be regarded as futile. They're simply unwilling to make any rule "big" enough to actually be useful here :(
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