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My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of
by buro9 12y ago
My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of screenshots for her papers.
This task is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes by. The most reliable method (for her skill level) is now to rip DVDs, removing various bits of protection, before playing the film using VLC on Windows and using VLC to take the screenshot. This is a pain, as she now uses a Mac primarily (as most academia seems to be doing so almost exclusively because it makes presentations easier - connecting to projectors turns out to be the killer feature).
For a lot of films though, she pauses a film and uses a camera directed at the TV. Or worse, she'll record the clip on a camera (using the camera's microphone).
Aside from things like Box of Broadcasts (which is for UK broadcast TV), there are few to no resources for academics to resort to for sources of film that will enable dissemination to students through materials and presentations. All clips are short (10-30s), papers feature only a few screenshots when published.
Regardless of the studio and technology company desire to lock things down and control distribution, there remains a very legal exception to their controls: education.
And of course, education has resorted to alternatives to these locks. There exists private torrent sites that are collections of obscure, international and predominantly non-Hollywood productions. Like torrent sites pre-Netflix, these are actually the most reliable sources of films that academics use for sources. Even when an academic owns a DVD (as nearly all do for future presentation and citation purposes), the torrents deliver files that the academic can use to create clips and screenshots.
As much as possible, I try and help my partner avoid such sites. They are good, but in the hard world of academia I'm not sure her career will survive trying to argue any form of legitimacy of downloading content for academic purposes for already owned DVDs.
There is a very real and present danger that copy protections will harm libraries and education. They already are.
- juliangregorian 12y agoCurious why VLC/screenshot doesn't work on Mac?
- sjwright 12y agoIt certainly does work -- I use it frequently. The VLC snapshot tool works perfectly, and the system screen shot (cmd-shift-3/4) works too, at least on the H264 video I just tested with. Not sure what the issue could be.
- hobs 12y agoI have seen GPU acceleration cause problems with VLC taking screenshots before, the problem doesnt have anything to do with the video format as far as I remember, but with video drivers, updating those solved the issues.
- buro9 12y agoIt may be this. I assist remotely and thus far we've found Windows VLC after ripping a DVD and stripping copy protection to be the most reliable method. It just works almost every time (though even then she'll find some Windows computers at the uni don't work which the IT guy there suspects is to do with lower privileges and a clash with some group policy - but he doesn't know which ones). Helping non-technical people get things done isn't just a case of figuring what works today, it's also what is most consistent and will continue to work. She very much gets used to one way of doing thing and disrupting that really interferes with her just getting work done.
- higherpurpose 12y agoThe strangest part is that according to the law (fair use) she should be able to do that. This DRM is effectively creating its own "copyright law", just like Cory Doctorow has warned us before. The whole copyright gang from MPAA to OS vendors and chip makers are using DRM to expand the reach of copyright law. And you can't just say "well I'll just break the DRM, since it's legal for me to take the screenshot" either. Because breaking DRM is illegal...So in order to exercise one of your rights you have to break another law.
- mikeryan 12y agoYou're conflating copyright law. She is legally allowed to take screenshots and clips from copyrighted material. There's nothing in or about copyright law that requires content providers to make this easy.
- jrochkind1 12y agoThe DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent technological protections in many instances where the result would still be fair use, if it weren't for the technological protections and the DMCA making circumventing them illegal. It's not just that the content providers 'make it hard' -- it's that their attempts to 'make it hard' are protected by law, not just by difficulty. Even if they DRM doesn't actually make it very hard at all, it's still protected by the DMCA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Title_I:_WIPO_Copyright_and_Performances_and_Phonograms_Treaties_Implementation_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
- tedunangst 12y agoIf you read the section on exemptions, you'll see that there's one for exactly this case: decrypting a dvd for the purpose of criticism.
- jrochkind1 12y agoYes, that is a temporary exemption made by the Librarian of Congress, as the law provides for such temporary exemptions (which can also be renewed by the Librarian -- or not). Nonetheless, the existence of the DMCA as a legal framework, I think, belies the picture the original comment I was responding to paints, of "Just because there is fair use doesn't mean the content providers need to make it easy to copy their works." The DMCA specifically gives the content providers technological "challenges" the force of law, and makes it illegal to circumvent them, without any general exception for fair uses. There are some few specific exemptions (not a general one for anything that constitutes 'fair use' under copyright law), which are not actually part of the law explicitly, but temporary and at the discretion of the Librarian of Congress.