MPAA Gives Teachers Stupid Solution to Creating Educational Clips

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set by Vimeo user Timothy Vollmer


The Copyright Office is currently going through proposed exceptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. One proposed exception concerns teachers, who would like the legal approval to rip DVD's and edit them for classroom use. To me, that sounds totally fine. However, if the Motion Picture Association of America were to say no, I'd probably say mean things to them, but recognize that copyright law is what it is.

However, instead of giving a "yes" or "no" answer, they showed off the video above, in which they try to convince the rulemaking comittee that videotaping your television with a camcorder is an acceptable alternative to ripping and editing video. Are you kidding me?

I'm no expert in copyright law. I understand that copyright law is a mess right now, and as technology destroys the entire model that copyright law was built upon in the first place it's only going to get tougher. But I know enough to say that FILMING YOUR TELEVISION IS NOT THE ANSWER!

I understand why they think it's the answer. This way, you only take the chunks you need, and the quality is worse. But having teachers film their televisions isn't going to solve anything.

The MPAA's draconian process takes longer, more equipment, crappier quality, and sacrifices the quality of education to the students to protect a mixtape of clips that is useless outside the classroom? The MPAA has a lot more to worry about than teachers putting together teaching materials.

There was a quote I found on boingboing that put it best:

In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?"

I'm not sure what the real answer is to copywrites in the 21st century. But it seems like both the MPAA and the RIAA strike-out every single time they've tried to impose their power on the new world of media, whether that's suing children for downloading, trying to make people feel bad for getting a movie for free, and now this. If they want to be seen as the protectors of intelligent property rather than out-of-touch executives on a power trip, they'll need to come up with some better solutions than what they've shown during the last decade.