DRM vs. Fair Use

My ex-roomie Julian offers another example of how digital rights management technology is needlessly inconveniencing paying customers:

A politics professor at a small liberal arts college is bringing a class to D.C. in March and has asked me to talk to his students, who have been doing a seminar on protest music in American politics, about some of the ideas in this column. Naturally, I’d like to be able to illustrate what I’m talking about with some examples, short clips from songs by Metric, Rilo Kiley, Green Day, Radiohead, Mike Doughty, The Decemberists, and others. I own all the songs in question–bought them on iTunes rather than just downloading them from Limewire or Kazaa. But Apple’s DRM doesn’t want to let me extract these short clips–indubitably a fair use, and something I could obviously do legally just by cueing up the songs manually at the appropriate timecode.

I’d be curious to know what DMCA supporters think he should do in this kind of case. Should he write a letter to each of the labels that publish these songs and ask for permission to use the exceprts? Should iTunes have a feature where you’re allowed to purchase small song clips for a nickel a piece? Or is it just possible that the most sensible way to deal with this sort of thing is to legalize DRM circumvention in circumstances where the use would otherwise be legal.

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