Copying A DVD Is Legal For Some

To be more specific, copying short clips of motion pictures for educational, documentary, or non-profit use is now legal.

History

In 1998, Congress passed a law called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which made it illegal to break or bypass digital encryption in order to access copyrighted works.  Many people who have created these copyrighted works (movies, books, music, and etc.) put digital encryption on them in order to prevent people from copying or illegally distributing them, which has become easy with the advent of the Internet and digital media.

Conflicting Laws

However, there are prior laws that allow certain legal uses of copyrighted works, such as for education.  This is referred to as “fair use”.  The conflict here is that although some uses are allowed (like showing a movie clip in class), the DMCA made it illegal to break any digital encryption to get to the point that you access the media for fair use.  This, in essence, nullified fair use for digital media with copyright protection schemes, the most common of which is DVDs.

Resolution

Every three years, the Library of Congress reviews and issues exemptions for non-infringing use of copyrighted works.  This year, the big story is that they allowed iPhone users to jailbreak their phones.  However, the more apropos part of their ruling for educators is that they extended the DVD copyright exemption for the following cases:

• Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students
• Documentary filmmaking
• Noncommercial videos.

If you can justify one of those situations, then refer to my previous post about how to copy a DVD clip using the software program VLC.

References: [ars technica] [NYT]