Hasta La Gadget!

It’s hard to believe that this video is real, but apparently it is. What you are seeing is the official, MPAA sanctioned method for teachers to make copies of DVDs for educational purposes. Are you ready? To make a copy you play the DVD and aim a camera at the TV screen. I told you it was hard to swallow.

So desperate is the movie industry’s crazy uncle to stop anyone breaking DVD copy protection that it actually made the above presentation at the Library of Congress, where a hearing is held every three years to decide whether or not any exemptions should be made to the DMCA laws.

Needless to say, it’s already too late (cough, Handbrake, cough), and this is clearly just an attempt to protect the DMCA in its current form rather than to actually stop teachers from copying movies. What we find particularly ironic, though, is that this is the exact same method that the MPAA wants to stop in cinemas, where evil teenagers use their cellphones to record movies off the screen.

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set [Vimeo]