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
Lester Norton, who writes under the pseudonym Solonor Rasreth on Blogcritics, wanted to excerpt quotations from the interviews with the soldiers who fought in WWII in the HBO DVD release Band of Brothers:
- The interview segments with the soldiers from the 'Band of Brothers' DVD are essential to putting into context the struggles depicted in the film series from HBO. It is a shame that the law prevents us from legally giving our readers an example of these interviews, which are only available on the DVD.58
Michael Croft, another Blogcritics contributor, finds that literature and professional film reviewers are privileged in their ability to be able to quote from audiovisual works in their reviews:
- The DVD special edition of the film Mansfield Park contains interviews with the stars and the director that provide information about how they blended elements from Jane Austen's life into her controversial book. Some of those anecdotes, which could be used to show how key themes were emphasized in the film, are only available on the DVD. That we cannot legally provide a multi-media sample of this material hurts our ability to provide the most clear and insightful reviews. It's as if Siskel and Ebert weren't allowed to show clips or the New York Times Review of Books were not allowed to directly quote from reviewed material.59
Jay Caruso, who contributed to the design of the Blogcritics website, believes that his ability to provide a full review of DVDs has been compromised, such as in his recent review of The Sum of All Fears DVD60:
- I recently reviewed 'The Sum Of All Fears' DVD release and touched upon some of the special features available on the disc. One of these features was the breakdown of the special effects created for the scene where the nuclear bomb was detonated. Allow[ing] viewers to see a segment of that special feature would allow them to experience part of it before they decided to make a purchase.
Article comments