We have a professor who shows a certain DVD in his introductory class. We have the same classes taught in the USA, Brazil, UK, Czech Republic and Dubai, UAE. I think that is at least 3 zones. I was thinking of ripping the DVD and then burning it without the zone protection, otherwise at every location he has to find a multi-zone player, which is a bitch.
He’ll be travelling with the original DVD and the ripped one, so…I think it is legal, in general, although there might be a strange local law. But since we are a USA University, I’d like to at least be legal in the USA.
More GQ goodness:
**
Sec. 1201 (a)(1)(A) of the DMCA states that (among other things):
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.** From here.
Again, let me note that while it is technically illegal to defeat the copy protection on a DVD, I think the idea that the MPAA expects your professor to buy no less than 3 copies of the exact same movie is absolutely ludicrous.
As strange as this may sound: Just because something is illegal, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Of course this board won’t tell you how.
It’s illegal because you are making an unauthorized copy. However, I don’t believe the non-circumvention clause of the DMCA applies.
Region-coding is not a copy-protection mechanism, it’s a market segmentation mechanism (and, arguably, an illegal barrier to free trade, but that’s a topic for GD). So circumventing it is not illegal under the DMCA. However, in order to not fall on the wrong side of traditional copyright, you’d have to circumvent it in some manner that did not require making a physical copy of the disc, such as through a region-free DVD player.
Incorrect, I am afraid. The anti-circumvention provisions are nowhere in the statute limited to nor recited in terms of “copy-protection.” See the quoted part of the statute. There are a number of reasons for this, but it seems pretty clear that Congress bowed to the wishes of content providers who did not want, e.g., the maker of a satellite-hacking device to be able to say, “Hey, sure I created a descrambler that circumvents the access control, but that was, um, just for experimental purposes, or to allow me to fine tune my reception.”
Now . . . one court has so far read in a requirement that in order to violate the anti-circumvention provisions, there must be an additional element of copyright violation, i.e., the intent to unlawfully abstract copyrighted content hidden behind the walls of the anti-circumvention provisions (this is the Federal Circuit’s Chamberlain v. Skylink case). However, neither the literal meaning of the statute, nor the legislative history, clearly supports this reading, and other courts have ruled that circumvention of the access control for any purpose is a violation.
Even if there is an implicit additional DMCA requirement that provides for liability only when circumvention is to faciliate a subsequent act of copyright infringement, the argument that the OP scenario does not involve a violative DMCA circumvention is flawed for two reasons:
(a) “Copyright violation” is not limited to “unauthorized copying.” It can also include “making available for unauthorized viewing or playback” (as here); and
(b) Region coding allows content owners to segment markets for their DVDs. Copyrights are territorial – in other words, there is a separate national copyright interest in “Titanic” (or your instructor’s video) in the U.S., in the U.K., and in Japan, or the ME. You bought the rights to use the disk in one of these regions. If you had wanted the separate and additional rights to use it in the other three, the publisher would have charged you separate and additional fees. He didn’t, so you don’t have those territorial rights, so your use of the region 1 disk in regions 2-4 technically (depending on those region’s national law) violates additional rights (and perhaps violates a shrinkwrap license you agreed to when buying the DVD in region 1).
None of this is to say I believe DMCA is a great thing, but a realistic reading of its facial meaning leads to the conclusion that playing around with circumvention is, until the courts or legislature weigh in with more clarity, a legally risky proposition.
