Alas this question is nowhere near as "basic" as you anticipated. What you describe here is fully within the fair use window of copyright - making a copies of a short section of a larger work for educational non-commercial purposes. But - and this is a huge but - it would still be considered a federal crime if you carried it out. Because in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the entertainment industries got an anti-circumvention provision put into the law that makes it criminal to copy material that has anti-copying protection on it (like nearly every DVD) - even if the purpose is fair use! Just another example of the U.S. Government giving public interests short shrift to maintain campaign funding... In any case, there actually are exceptions to this facet of the DMCA, as the Librarian of Congress can mandate particular uses legitimate (generally for archiving obsolete media) - see http://www.copyright.gov/1201/. Alas there's no exception for fair use, which is tragic. So what can we do to overcome the annoyances and limitations of teaching with DVDs? According to the industry, what we should do is take a video camera and shoot the image of the material we wish to copy off of a television - really useful for teaching visual analysis, huh? If anyone should choose to become a felon for pedagogy, google "DVD rip" and you'll find plenty of resources - although (I've heard...) it's not terribly easy to excerpt DVD material, as the file formats are not user-friendly. I would really like to see film & media scholars take a more active role in pushing back against Hollywood interests, making the feds (& Hollywood itself) more aware of how these types of laws might potentially dismantle the study of film & media, which I would argue is neither in the public nor media industry's best interest. If anyone is equally outraged by this state of affairs, I highly recommend getting involved, calling your Congresspeople (for those of you in the U.S. - I have no idea how this plays out elsewhere in the world...), and reading some of the excellent work on copyright activism & policy. A good place to start is Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (http://free-culture.org/). Off my soapbox, -Jason Mittell -- Jason Mittell, Assistant Professor of American Civilization and Film & Media Culture Middlebury College 204 Adirondack House Middlebury, Vermont 05753 (802) 443-3435 / fax: (802) 443-5123 http://seguecommunity.middlebury.edu/sites/jmittell > Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:18:35 -0600 > From: Lou Thompson <[log in to unmask]> > Subject: a basic question > > Hello all, > > When I test my undergraduates, I like to show them brief clips of films = > and ask them to comment on specific things (editing, lighting, etc). = > Cueing was easy enough to do with videotapes, but now that I'm using = > DVDs almost exclusively it's becoming a problem. =20 > > I was wondering if any of you have any suggestions as to hardware or = > software that will enable me to copy these short clips (usually less = > than a minute) for testiing purposes.=20 > > Thanks. > > ______________________________________________ > Dr. Lou Ann Thompson > Professor of English > Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages > Texas Woman's University > Denton, TX 76204 > _________________________________________________ > > "One Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppression"--William Blake > > ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu