JD Lasica is the author of Darknet, an excellent new book on the copyfight (the cover blurb I provided for it: "The entertainment companies are stealing your future — robbing you
blind with locks and laws and rhetoric that tunrs anyone who makes and
shares culture without their permission into a crook. Get mad, get
even, get on the darknet and *fight back*."). He's posting excerpts from the book on his site.
This excerpt deals with the presentation that Intel VP Donald Whiteside made to Congressional panels on the way in which copyright is limiting the technology industry, and how he had to break federal law to do normal, everyday things.
"I used a program to copy a few seconds from the DVD of the movie Rudy," he said. "It's the scene showing the final game of the Notre Dame season with Rudy's family in the stands cheering wildly when he got to play. I then spliced in some snippets of pro players doing a touchdown dance from NFL Films, and I overlaid it with audio from 'Who Let the Dogs Out?'
"I stitched this all together with video of my son, and it turned out to be the piece of home video that gets watched the most in our house. When relatives or members of the football team come over, we pop it in and we just laugh. The added scenes and music really bring it all to life."
There was just one problem. "It turns out to do this, I violated the DMCA. I used the DeCSS program to circumvent the encryption and access the movie clips on the DVD that I own," Whiteside told the aides. "The end product is a DVD that I don't sell or distribute but is considered a derivative work under copyright law."
