Poking Holes in the DMCA

Written by Eric Olsen
Published December 18, 2002
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Many of those who use blogs ("bloggers"), frequently comment and criticize the media. These comments are often valuable reviews of works. The insight of Blogcritics was that these valuable works of criticism and commentary could be hosted on a single site so that visitors could easily find and read them. The site has been very successful, attracting over one hundred contributors and tens of thousands of visitors.

Eric Olsen, the founder and administrator of Blogcritics, believes the addition of quotations from ancillary materials on DVD would make the site even more attractive and useful to visitors.

Already quotations from books and links to samples of music are available on Blogcritics. Quotations from DVDs would be an obvious addition, but Mr. Olsen would be exposing himself to criminal liability for circumventing CSS in order to create the noninfringing quotations.

Furthermore, many of the individual contributors to Blogcritics find that their commentary on DVDs is inhibited by § 1201(a)(1), and the value of their criticism is hampered as a result:

Phillip Winn, who has posted many reviews, including one regarding the recent Disney DVD release of Tarzan & Jane,53 complains that,

    Since the quality of DVD extras vary so much from release to release, DVD viewers have grown increasingly skeptical of the value of promised DVD extras. Being able to show short clips from some releases helps to demonstrate the value of some excellent release. Some recent examples include 'O Brother Where Art Thou' and 'Fight Club,' both of which had excellent behind-the-scenes documentaries, snippets of which would have greatly enhanced reviews of the discs.

    However, given the DMCA, even short clips that I would previously considered "fair use" are now off-limits. I cannot use them, and readers will not know about them. I can describe them, of course, but much like describing color to a blind person, it's difficult to express in print how good some of these interviews and documentaries are.54

Ed Driscoll, a writer whose work has appeared in such magazines as Audio/Video Interiors, Electronic House, Home Automation, and Smart TV and Sound, has published a number of reviews on Blogcritics. He has noted 55 some of his reviews that would have been improved had he been legally permitted to circumvent CSS in order to quote from the works. Below are quotations from two of his reviews that show where passages that would be enhanced by a quotation from the DVD:

    Law & Order Arrives on DVD:
    "Everybody's Favorite Bagman", Law & Order's pilot episode (and included on this DVD), was shot on 16mm, for a deliberately crude, grainy and streetwise look. As Wolf explains on the DVD's documentary, when it came time to run the pilot on national TV, executives at NBC thought its image quality was below their standards, and it took a direct OK from Brandon Tartikoff for it to air.56

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Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and publisher of Blogcritics.org, which, quite frankly, rules - as do his wife and four children.
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Poking Holes in the DMCA
Published: December 18, 2002
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Section: Culture
Filed Under: Video: News
Writer: Eric Olsen
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