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Contact and Help

	Brian Cockburn's principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, and intellectual property.
Phone: 8-6978

Copyright@JMU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Can I rip portions of a DVD to include in teaching material?

Professors may legally extract movie clips and incorporate them into lectures, other videos, and teaching material.

The U.S. Copyright office recently announced an exemption that allows professors in all fields and “film and media studies students” to hack encrypted DVD content and clip “short portions” into documentary films and “non-commercial videos.” (The agency does not define “short portions.”) (see Movie Clips and Copyright – Inside Higher Ed)

The exemption also permits professors to use ripped content in non-classroom settings that are similarly protected under “fair use” — such as presentations at academic conferences.