Every three years, the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress holds DMCA 1201 hearings to determine if exemptions should be made to the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In 2006, media and film professors successfully won an exemption from the DMCA to legally break DVD copy protection in order to use high-quality clips in the classroom. The 2009 hearings are in progress this week, and up for discussion is whether or not this same exemption should be granted to educators in all subjects, and if students should also be covered by the exemption.

Rrepresentatives of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) argue that there is no need to break DVD copy-protection, and went on to demonstrate at length that that for fair-use scenarios users should consider videotaping a TV screen to extract the video segments for use in the classroom. I’ll say that again, just in case you missed it…the MPAA suggests that videotaping a flatscreen television is an acceptable alternative for educators to capture and use video clips in the classroom.

Besides the sheer irony of this idea coming from an organization that has spent countless dollars and time trying to stop camcorder users in theaters, it shows just how out of touch they really are with reality. Do they really expect educators to go through the process of realtime analog workarounds for FAIR USE in today’s digital world? Unbelievable. An attendee to these hearings filmed and posted the MPAA’s video demonstration of their analog method of bypassing copy-protection. You can watch below. If you’re like me, you’ll be holding your jaw up off the floor.

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

To add to the irony of it all, I noticed that their demonstration appeared to be played from a computer using VLC, a media player software whose original featureset included the ability to DeCSS DVDs for playback over a network. Nice. Wendy Seltzer was also at the hearings and live-tweeted it as well as wrote a nice blog recap. You can read that here.