Posted on 05/07/2009 2:11:41 PM PDT by dangerdoc
So the Copyright Office is currently in the middle reviewing proposed exceptions to the DMCA, and one of the proposals on the table would allow teachers and students to rip DVDs and edit them for use in the classroom. Open and shut, right? Not if you're the MPAA and gearing up to litigate the legality of ripping -- it's trying to convince the rulemaking committee that videotaping a flatscreen is an acceptable alternative. Seriously. It's hard to say if we've ever seen an organization make a more tone-deaf, flailing argument than this.
Take a good look, kids. This is what an industry looks like right before it dies. Video after the break
Why should they be copying and editing DVDs in the classroom, unless it’s a class in the process of doing that?
These media goons never cease to amaze me.
Sometimes a few lines from a scene of a tv show or movie can illustrate a concept in a humorous or memorable way that makes a lasting impression and brings home the point much better than any textbook explanation possibly could.
Then recite the lines.
Why should teachers be photocopying a few pages or chapters out of a book instead of providing copies of the whole text to students?
The law has always permitted copies to be made in an educational environment.
It can be a documentary, it can be a historical recreation, it can be a reading of shakespeare, it can be a lot of things reference in a lecture.
I think you read the article wrong. The “editing for use in the classroom” means that instead of buying the DVD and copying for use in the classroom (think videotaping a program like National Geographic for the classroom the next day), they are suggesting the teacher buy a video camera, videotape the TV and then show the class.
Which doesn’t make sense because either they have a DVD camcorder (do they even sell the old VHS ones anymore?) or using a digital camcorder and putting it on DVD.
So maybe I’m the one that’s confused.
Did you read it to mean they were actually copying and editing the actual DVD INSIDE the classroom? Because they meant for USE inside the classroom.
One of the many idiocies of the last administration is that it didn’t take away the Clinton special-interest subsidy to Hollyweird, aka the DMCA.
I agree that videotaping something off TV to use in class is absurd. However, the claim that they can’t teach without multimedia frou-frou is absurd, too - particularly when it involves copyrighted Hollywood materials.
I have to agree with the MPAA. If the students and teachers weren’t so busy copying DVDs, they’d have more time to sext each other over their cell phones.
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My only thought is how annoying it is to find a video where someone has taken video of their tv and converted it to a format for viewing on the internet, instead of doing a direct conversion from their feed to the tv. I don’t care what their living room looks like, and along with much better video, they’re converting anyway.
So, back to on-topic for you guys...
No, I understood the general concept. However, I find the educational “need” farcical. On other other hand, I really don’t care if they do or don’t.
Irrelevant. They can teach in a cave by scratching diagrams into the rock, but there's no reason they should be expected to do that, either.
The bottom line is that the law permits a certain degree of fair use, and Hollyweird is attempting to violate that law. If the GOP had any spine, the DMCA would be history and infringements of fair-use rights would carry penalties every bit as severe as infringements of copyright.
Good idea. I guess we should have to retype the lines from a news article one line at a time per post if we want to discuss it on a news forum too, right?
It's about the circumvention of the copy protection on the DVD. They don't want a teacher to rip a DVD and put the class-relevant parts into a video. They want the teacher to spend money, buy a camcorder, make a severely inferior copy by shooting a TV screen, import that into a computer, then edit that.
If the teacher puts it on a DVD the teacher will likely not use the copy protection so that's not an issue.
No, it's not, because the taxpayers are paying for all of the equipment, and dealing with the results of the wasted time.
If the GOP had any spine, the DMCA would be history and infringements of fair-use rights would carry penalties every bit as severe as infringements of copyright.
Fine with me.
My mom, when she was teaching Shakespeare to our homeschool co-op, would try to find a really good production of the play to pass around halfway through the class. When we did “Much Ado About Nothing” she used the really excellent Kenneth Branagh version but had to find someone to edit the video for her to remove two brief scenes with nudity and similar stuff not entirely appropriate for 14 year old homeschool kids.
I could see a similar use in a classroom, maybe, but that’s about it.
Even better, schools have MUCH more leeway for fair use than the rest of us do. The educational exemption is pretty broad. The MPAA just doesn't want it to be legal to rip a DVD, period. That would be a chink in their armor.
The full article may have mentioned this but there is a (to the best of my memory) 30-second fair use provision for audio and video.
Copyright has an EXEMPTION for educational purposes. Quit letting Hollywood Big Media rewrite our nation’s copyright laws.
They’ve already extended the duration of “limited time” to beyond our lifetime (it is agreed that all works eventually will lapse, by agreement, into the public domain, we will never live to see that day under current extensions).
They are now working to change 80+ years of established history on royalties paid by stations for music on played on the radio.
Their rotten business model is sinking. If they didn’t have 75+ years of pop culture sitting in vaults (much of which would have become public domain by now if they had not continued lobbying for the change of existing laws), they would have been bankrupted decades ago.
Why is it Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and the majority of novels adapted by Disney are public domain but the works of MGM, Disney, and WB are not? Are they some how more deserving?
In England, they are working to extend copyright another 25 years. Why? Because unlike the works of Elvis, and Sinatra, and even the Brit Lonnie Donagan, they are concerned that the works of the godly Beatles are going to suddenly lapse into the public domain. Heaven forbid. Two of them are dead and Paul is worth upwards of a billion dollars.
But the laws must be changed for cultural reasons. If they’d seen fit to protect ALL artists along the way, they may have had a case.
And none of their arguments should trump the rights of educators to do as has been permitted for the entire 20th century.
I suppose that makes sense. Not that many 14-year-olds, homeschooled or not, haven’t seen a backside, but it would be an administrative problem.
Fortunately, in a land where liberty and freedom are valued, our permissions aren't based on "need". As for educational use, I am glad that as a part-time instructor I have the ability and the freedom to use technology and innovation in order to stimulate learning in many different ways, regardless of whether somebody deems there to be a "need" for those techniques and methods.
Hollyweird isn’t so quick to respect the rights of ownership of the photographer/model of sexting messages.
Exactly, editing a pg-13 film to a pg rating (well aside from all the bawdy jokes but for some reason the moms didn’t complain about those) makes sense. There can be legitimate reasons to use films in class - not many, but a few.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking music and/or video clips for PowerPoint (or similar) projects. Those could easily happen outside a computer class.
As far as my computer teacher was concerned, "educational purpose" always trumped copyright. Legally, this is often true. It looks like they're trying to narrow educational purposes.
What, specifically, do you want me to do about it?
My opinion that school instruction is full of expensive, high-tech crap is irrelevant to how my Congresscritter, Mrs. Myrick, votes on things like this. In fact, I have no idea how she votes, because I'm much more interested in her positions on national defense and immigration.
And I disagree completely.
As a Criminal Justice student, we watch Forensic File episodes, Documentaries on prisons, 20/20 and other such videos about twice a week.
To think you expect the teacher to stand up there and recite every point in a classroom setting is not only ridiculous, but time consuming and unnecessary.
He can explain the ENTIRE case with a flash point of images, or he can pop in an episode of 20/20. Which is better for the educational system? I know I pay attention to the TV show more, I’m sure I’m not the only one.
That’s a joke, right? Cause if so, it’s kinda funny.
Okay, we disagree.
heeeeee
But not on the legal point, because I don’t care, legally, whether teachers show DVDs or not.
“Irrelevant.
No, it’s not, because the taxpayers are paying for all of the equipment, and dealing with the results of the wasted time.”
Huh? You make no sense.
Of course I’m joking.
Precisely. "You don't need that" is exactly the Brady Bunch argument in favor of banning Big Scary Guns.
This is how the old kinescope films were made by filming a monitor of the video feed during many tv shows in the fifties. The 39 lost episodes (found) of the Honeymooners were all kinescopes.
Interestingly enough the MPAA is letting the cat out of the bag by highlighting how essentially all the software/hardware protections will not eliminate the ability to essentially create these newfangled kinescopes. And since the audio feed can still be captured directly, coupled with the ability to make a very decent image using the kinescope method, guarantees that there will always be decent pirated movies.
What would be better for the educational system is to stop using TVs for anything ever. Frankly TVs are the tool of lazy teachers who don’t feel like going through the trouble of preparing a proper lecture. Of all the TV time I got stuck with in school maybe 10% of it was actually useful, the rest was a cheap excuse for the teacher to spend a week sitting down not talking.
Poo Poo, she should have acted out every part of every character herself.
I mean actually letting you watch a MOVIE as a teaching tool of the intensity of Shakespeare!!
The “that’s about it” part is the whole part!
You guys are acting like teachers aren’t doing anything but watching movies in class. Of course that’s ‘about it’. But it’s a big IT!
Thank you for catching the similarity in the arguments.
I think you are right. It’s as if they confused videotaping a broadcast under the fair use act, with videotaping a TV display of a copyrighted DVD.
I’m not sure exactly what the rules under the fair use act are. I would think if you only have an excerpt of a broadcast you are using for educational means, that could probably use it in a class, but I’m not certain. But I don’t think you could ever use even an excerpt from a copyrighted DVD without permission.
TV's are a poor medium for this anyway. I prefer to integrate the digital video into a multimedia presentation that is then displayed via data projector onto a large screen. As for whether the educational system would be better if the use of multimedia were removed and the students had to sit in the class for hours listening to the teacher lecture and take notes, you will probably find a lot of technological Luddites who hold that view, but it is rather ironic and amusing to see it being expressed on an internet forum where people copy articles for discussion and often post images and hyperlinks to add either information or humor to the discussion.
If I had more time, I'd find a link to the scene from Ferris Beuller's Day Off where Ben Stein is lecturing his class on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Great Depression as an illustration of the type of classroom environment you seem to be advocating.
“My opinion that school instruction is full of expensive, high-tech crap is irrelevant to how my Congresscritter, Mrs. Myrick, votes on things like this. In fact, I have no idea how she votes, because I’m much more interested in her positions on national defense and immigration.”
A DVD player ($35) and TV ($200) rolled from classroom to classroom is “expensive and high tech”?
And once again, to dispute your point, much less TIME (and time is money) is spent in showing this video on a less than $250 total equipment cost SHARED expense than having the teacher recite it.
I disagree.
There are plenty of times that a TV show is a valid teaching tool.
“If I had more time, I’d find a link to the scene from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off where Ben Stein is lecturing his class on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Great Depression as an illustration of the type of classroom environment you seem to be advocating. “
OH OH OH EXCELLENT EXAMPLE!!!
The internet already makes this irrelevant.
And as long as you ask (and get) permission, you can present copyrighted works in schools.
It’s not a Luddite view, it’s looking at how the tool is misused as a crutch to replace skill. I got stuck watching Dr Zhivago 3 times in 12 months (sophomore English, global studies, and junior English), what is there really to learn from Dr Zhivago once, much less 3 times?! And that’s pretty typical of TV in the classroom.
As for “multimedia presentations” forget about it Power Point is a blight used to cover for poor speaking ability. It’s used to cover for lack of ability, it’s a tool for people that probably shouldn’t be publicly speaking in the first place to play to a dark room with people looking somewhere else.
There’s nothing wrong with students listening to lectures and taking notes. That’s how you actually learn anyway, it’s well known that some level of active participation (like writing things down and asking questions) assists the learning process, darkened rooms for TV or Power Point discourage and avoid active participation, and thus specifically avoid learning.
The fact that you want to post a video of a comedy scene about a bad lecturer just accidentally proved my point. Yes there are bad lecturers in the world, and if you really pay attention to the scene you’ll notice he’s just like a TV, no active participation from the students. The classroom I’m advocating is nothing like that, people who can’t give a good lecture shouldn’t teach, the crutch of TVs doesn’t make good lecturers, it just gives them somewhere to hide.
I’d forgotten how fashed people get over this. Y’all have a nice evening.
There are SOME times, but most of the time it’s just a crutch for poor teachers. Off the top of my head one time I can think of the TV being actually useful was in American Government, the teacher found a PBS series of round table discussions on various Constitutional points. The show was useful because it presented about a dozen views on each episode, also the teacher didn’t do the typical turn off lights-turn on TV, go sit down; it took us two or three class sessions to get through each 1 hour episode because he would pause it to add his own point and open up class room discussion. In that style the TV can be useful, but that’s so rarely the method used, most of the time it’s turn on the TV and turn off the teacher.
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