Martine Courant Rife, JD, PhD, will present arguments before two panels at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, May 6-7, on the subject of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Rulemaking. Rife will make her case before the Librarian of Congress, James Hadley Billington, and the U.S. Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters.
The U.S. Copyright Office is conducting the rulemaking proceeding as mandated by the DMCA, which provides that the Librarian of Congress may exempt certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. As set forth on the U.S. Copyright Office web site, “The purpose of the proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention of access controls.”
For the first panel, Rife, who received her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University in 2008, will argue for exemption to the DMCA for students and teachers who want to cut into a DVD and copy snippets for fair use to create either classroom teaching materials or produce student projects.
“I’ve been aware for awhile that film teachers had received an exemption from the DMCA for fair use of films, and talked to some colleagues to learn more about the process,” Rife says. “I then drafted a document in support of an exemption for DVDs, and was selected to participate and present.”
Currently a professor in the Writing Program at Lansing Community College, Rife will use survey results from her PhD research to support her argument for an exemption.
“I will be citing results from an empirical data study that I conducted of nearly 400 respondents commenting on their knowledge of the existence of a chilling of digital communication and free speech due to copyright law, and the perceived level of chilling,” says Rife. “Titled ‘Rhetorical Invention in Copyright Imbued Environments,’ my dissertation included research that surveyed professional writing teachers and students in a random sampling from across the country, including input from 64 professional writing programs, as well as interviews with seven digital writers.”
Rife will also be presenting an example of the type of student-created scholarly work that would be covered by an exemption: a digital documentary that includes clips from various films to challenge the stereotypes of African-Americans as they appear in movies.
In her presentation to the second panel, Rife will argue in support of an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) exemption request “aimed at protecting the video remix culture currently thriving on Internet sites like YouTube. The filing asks for a DMCA exemption for amateur creators who use excerpts from DVDs in order to create new, noncommercial works. Hollywood takes the view that ‘ripping’ DVDs is always a violation of the DMCA, no matter the purpose.”
““In the course of my research,” Rife says, “the teachers that I spoke with related the problems that they were experiencing with copyright law. Students would come in with an excellent piece of work that clearly made a cultural or political statement, but it was obvious that they had broken copyright law to produce it. The teacher is then forced into the quandary of having to either enforce copyright law for the government, or look the other way.”
Adds Rife, “Seeking an exemption seemed a good way to carry forward the concerns of the teachers and students that I had interviewed, and in a sense, pay them back for their participation as unpaid survey respondents. Above and beyond that, many believe that it’s also the right thing to do.”
For more: the beyondwords blog
