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
The Message is the Medium: Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi come to DVD:
The Koyaanisqatsi DVD comes with a fairly comprehensive video interview of Reggio and his soundtrack composer, Philip Glass. At one point, Reggio refers to technology as "the beast", and an oppressive one at that. And yet, Reggio, his cinematographer, the brilliant Ron Fricke and Glass each push technology to the limit while simultaneously attacking it. At one point in Koyaanisqatsi, during a rapidly speeded-up night cityscape, the camera pans, in a perfectly fluid motion past a huge Miesian office building and thousands of cars whirring past underneath. Think of the technology involved in that camera movement: Selecting a camera designed to shoot a frame or two a second to get that speeded-up look. And loading it with the right film stock to shoot at night, the right filter on the lens to shoot in nothing but city lights, the right motorized head to allow the camera to pan at an ultra-low speed, etc. And then have the lab properly develop the film and time the prints, etc. And then add Glass's music, largely performed on synthesizers in a recording studio.57
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