Great day for VJs! Congress OKs DVD “sampling”.

scobot | July 28, 2010

VJs have long been covered under “FAIR USE” for their appropriation and reinventing of content, but HOW this content was acquired was still a bit of a grey area. It was ok to use the content (as long as you “recontextualized” it), but not ok to, in the case of DVDs, bypass the CSS encryption. Now it is!

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent article by Nate Anderson for ars technica :

First up: DVDs! Previous exemptions have been carved out for college professors who might use film clips in class. But note the broad nature of the new rule—it applies to everyone. As long as you are making a documentary or noncommercial video, you’re in.

The exemption only covers "short portions of motion pictures," since the Register was not convinced that longer portions would necessarily be fair use. And if there’s some other way of getting the clips short of bypassing DRM, you should take it.

According to the official explanatory text (PDF), "Where alternatives to circumvention can be used to achieve the noninfringing purpose, such noncircumventing alternatives should be used." Thus, if you have screen capture software and need only a low-quality copy for some purpose, you should use that.

But the exemption is a key one, despite its limiting language. As the Librarian of Congress finally admitted, "I agree with the Register that the record demonstrates that it is sometimes necessary to circumvent access controls on DVDs in order to make these kinds of fair uses of short portions of motion pictures."

You can read the full article here on ars technica:

Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are "fair use"

Here is the “Official” Library of Congress release:

Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works

SAMPLE ON TRUE BELIEVERS!

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