MPAA To Teachers: Don’t Rip DVDs, Camcord Them!

Current hearings in Congress about exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are focusing on the following: should it be legal for teachers to circumvent copy-protection on DVDs so that they can show video clips to their classes?

No, says the Motion Picture Association of America. Besides, why would you want to do this? There’s a perfectly reasonable alternative: point a video camera at the screen!

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

Two things:

1. Not every teacher has a high-quality monitor and camcorder, so it would cost educational institutions an enormous amount of money before this ridiculously convoluted workaround could produce usable results.
2. The jokes write themselves.