DMCA testimony from June 4, 2012

On Monday, June 4, I testified in this year's hearings about exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Rebecca Tushnet is doing her usual comprehensive write-ups of panels and has already posted her notes from our panel. What I'm posting here are my own notes from which I spoke; as usual, I sort of riffed as I went, so the official transcript, when published, will be slightly different. I've also added, in [brackets], a few comments, elaborations, and clarifications.

I introduced myself and explained my Official Credentials, and then I began...

I’m also a vidder myself, and that’s the perspective from which I’ll be speaking today. Professor Tushnet and Professor Coppa have spoken about the legal and cultural aspects of remix video; I’m going to talk about aesthetic and technical concerns.

There are two main points that I want to make: 1) Vidders need high quality source for both rhetorical and aesthetic reasons. 2) The screencapture solution posed at the May 11 Tech Day hearings doesn’t work.

( more about these arguments under the cut! )

There were a few moments from the Q&A about which I hope to post in the next day or so, because they were this amazing blend of offensive and hilarious—the short version is that one of the industry lawyers attempted to mansplain video capture and frame size to me and I got to actually say the sentence "Well, the problem with that is that it's not true." But more on that anon.