This week, Brigham Young University hopes to influence revisions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. BYU would like to change certain limitations on circumvention and reproduction of copyrighted motion pictures in order to use them in ways that meet copyright’s Educational Exemption more often.
The Educational Exemption allows instructors and students of non-profit educational organizations to show copyrighted materials in a face-to-face classroom setting for educational purposes. But, the DMCA is a law that prohibits people from decrypting the technology that safeguards copyrighted material on things like DVDs and BluRays. Under the DMCA, for instructors and students to take advantage of the exemption, they have to use licensed decryption technology, such as DVD players and BluRay players, in order to play films in class. But, this type of technology is aging out in many universities, and licensed optical drives (aka disk drives) are getting increasingly phased out on common market models of personal computers.
In response to this technological development, BYU suggests that an exemption to the DMCA be expanded to allow nonprofit educational institutions to circumvent technological protection measures solely for uses that qualify under the Educational Exemption. This would include copies of a legally purchased motion picture on a computer storage device or a server. For example, if an instructor has an old DVD of a clip he or she would like to show to a class, but there are no DVD players available, BYU suggests that the instructor should be able to use software to get a copy of the clip off of the DVD in order to show it in the classroom.
This type of storage would enable instructors to synch up consecutive segments from motion pictures as part of a lesson, in addition some custom instruction to the video playback to enhance its educational quality. Without this ability, instructors have to try to sync different clips out of several full-length works, which may require switching DVDs or BluRays out and navigating through a menu to get to, in some cases, a ten second clip for the lesson.
Currently, the DMCA has exemptions for educational uses like the one above, but these exemptions distinguish between courses that focus on film and media studies and other types of courses. BYU argues that this distinction has no basis in copyright statute and suggests that the Educational Exemption did not mean to limit motion picture playback to film courses alone.
See the entirety of BYU’s DMCA Comment here: BYU-long-form-comment