You would think that the movie industry, which celebrates documentarians every year at its awards ceremonies, would want to help those filmmakers overcome the hurdles posed by changing technology. But Hollywood's copyright holders don't see things quite that way. In fact, they're trying to make it harder for documentarians to practice their craft, opposing the latter's bid for the freedom to extract short clips directly from DVDs.

This is an arcane topic that's down in the weeds of federal copyright law. But if you'd like to explore it further, hop on over to the Times' Technology blog, where I write about it at length. Click here for the shortcut.

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