STANFORD

The 2010 DVD Exemption to the DMCA: An Interview with Abigail De Kosnik, Gary Handman and Mark Kaiser of University of California, Berkeley

Guest interviewer: Eli Edwards

The latest round of Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions, granted by the Librarian of Congress, has received a lot of press, partly for an exemption for bypassing DRM on DVDs and partly for the 2 exemptions that allow “jailbreaking” of smartphone operating systems (such as the iPhone) to allow non-authorized software and applications to run on the phone, or use the phone on a non-authorized wireless network.

The most recent DVD exemption is as follows:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

(ii) Documentary filmmaking;

(iii) Noncommercial videos

To find out more about the DVD exemption and what it means for the educational community, we talked to three people who advocated for the DVD exemptions at the DMCA rulemaking hearing held at Stanford Law School by the Copyright Office last year. Professor Abigail (“Gail”) De Kosnik, Gary Handman and Mark Kaiser are all educators at the University of California, Berkeley and all three addressed the copyright panel on the importance of being able to make high-quality film clips for their teaching and researching activities (transcript of the Stanford hearing here).

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Here’s a great opportunity to talk with Stanford Law Library folks who are co-hosting the free workshop with Carl Malamud (Public.resource.org) on making primary legal materials more accessible. Joining the discussion will be Anurag Acharya (Google) and Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard).

Registration is required. Contact Erika Wayne evwayne@stanford.edu to register.

Here’s the schedule. Hope to see you there.

Law.Gov Workshop
Stanford University Law School, Rm 290
January 12, 2010

9AM – Coffee available for early arrivals

10AM – Welcome and Overview

10:30AM – The National Inventory of Primary Legal Materials
Discussion of how to define primary legal materials.
Discussion of how to structure the national survey, including what
information to collect.

11:15AM – General Discussion of Legal Issues
Discussion of issues such as copyright over primary legal materials,
enabling legislation, and other issues of the law.

12PM – Lunch

1PM-2PM – Public Presentation, Room 290
“Law.Gov – A Revolution in Legal Affairs”
Anurag Acharya (Google), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Jonathan
Zittrain (Harvard)

2:15-3:30 – Technical Discussion
Discussion of technical challenges, including specification of a core
open source system, issues of markup and citation, issues of privacy,
issues of ingestion, issues of authentication.
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Pay parking available at Parking Structure 6 (PS6) at Campus Drive
East and Arguello Mall and the Tresidder Lot near Tresidder Union and
the Faculty Club, off Mayfield Ave.