The U.S. Copyright Office recently had a hearing to consider fair use exemptions for the DMCA. One of the exemptions brought up was to allow circumvention of DVD copyright protection in order to make clips for educational use. As one would expect, the MPAA was resistant to this idea. Public Knowledge (and others) have reported that the MPAA demonstrated an alternative method of using a camcorder and tripod to capture the clips off of a TV screen.

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

As Martine Courant Rife pointed out, this method is "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." I'm certain most of us in education agree with Martine and find the MPAA's method ludicrous. But if it's fair use for educators to record short clips off of the screen for educational purposes, it's fair use for our students, too.

Now, IANAL, but it seems to me the MPAA has opened a door for a wider fair use practice. Screen size shouldn't matter, right? Perhaps we should test this and send legions of students into the movie theaters armed with video recording devices. Maybe that potential fair use instance might make the MPAA reconsider again their stance on allowing DVD DeCSS.