MPAA Shows How Teachers Should Record Movies By Camcording Their TVs

from the ok-then... dept

As you probably know, every three years, the Librarian of Congress gets to review requests for special "exemptions" to the DMCA. It's a ritual every three years, and every three years most people hoping to get rid of some of the worst abuses of the DMCA are disappointed. Back in 2003 very few exemptions were issued, and in 2006 it basically extended the exemptions and added a few very, very narrowly defined and specific exemptions -- and did nothing for consumers. This year, the process is going on again with a variety of requests for exemptions.

But, of course, the process also has some requests in the other direction as well... The entertainment industry, for example, would like fewer examples. Kevin alerts us to some video of a recent hearing, where the MPAA actually (you have to see it to believe it) demonstrates how to use a camcorder to videotape a movie off a TV: Why would the MPAA show this? Because it wants to remove the (very narrow) exemptions that were granted in 2006 to media professors who wanted to copy clips of movies from DVDs for the purpose of education. But the MPAA wants the Library of Congress to take away that exemption, and is using this demonstration to show that a media professor shouldn't need to break DRM on DVDs, when they can go through the cumbersome process of recording the DVD via the "analog hole" of playing it on a TV and capturing it with a video camera.

Filed Under: analog hole, dmca, exemptions, recording, teachers, video

Instead Of Recording Music, Recreate It 1,000 Times More Efficiently Than MP3s (But Only For Clarinets)

from the that's-gotta-lose-some-quality dept

There's a report going around about some researchers who created a music file that's apparently 1,000 times smaller than MP3s. However, what's really interesting is how it's done. Rather than actually record the sound, it's designed to recreate the sound itself. As the article notes, it's more like the way a player piano plays music from a roll of punched paper than a recording of the original piano. Of course, that's got to make you wonder about the quality, and whether it comes out sounding mechanical, losing the actual nuances of how the music was played -- but the researchers insist their system captures exactly how the music was played as well. Don't expect to hear much out of this research for a while, though. Right now, the system is rather limited. It can only work with certain types of music (clarinet music from the sound of it), because they had to program in the specifics of how a clarinet is played (such as fingering, breath pressure, and lip pressure). Considering that they would then need to do that with every single instrument, somehow this doesn't seem likely to be in practical use any time soon.

Filed Under: clarinets, mp3, recording