Wolves in sheep’s clothing December 12, 2007
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Copyright in the Classroom , 3commentsA couple of recent developments in the copyright arena remind us that all news is “spun” one way or another (including this blog, I suppose).
A story yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Copyright Alliance is proposing a wiki site that will help broker permissions requests from academics; the idea is to have representatives of the content industry monitor the site for questions from professors in order to expedite the permissions process. Sounds good, since the process of asking permission is terribly cumbersome and the result is often nothing but silence from the rights holder. But wait; lets look at the example used in the story. A professor wants to show the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to a class on British Humor. Why, we should ask, is that professor seeking permission at all? An in-class screening of a film within the curriculum of a non-profit educational institution is clearly permitted under section 110(1) of the Copyright Act; no permission is needed as long as a legally obtained (bought, rented or borrowed) copy is used.
The fact that this example is used raises some troubling concerns. This wiki would not be the first attempt by the content industries to try to inculcate a more narrow view of the copyright exceptions than is actually the law under the guise of helping with permissions. Even worse, this site could add more ammunition to the claim that as it gets easier to ask for, and pay for, permission for a particular use, the scope of the fair use get narrower. It is imperative that academic institutions and faculty members make their own fair use decisions and ask permission when truly necessary, not merely when there is a convenient hand out to take the money.
Last week also saw the introduction in Congress of a bill called the PRO IP (for “prioritizing resources and organization for Intellectual Property”) Act. In spite of the name, there are many who are pro IP who will not be happy with this bill. Its primary purpose is to ratchet up, once again, the penalties for copyright infringement, both criminal and civil. In the realm of civil damages, this bill would allow music companies to get separate damages for the infringement of each track on an album that has been downloaded without authorization; for a twelve track album the potential damages would rise from a maximum of $30,000 to $360,000. This would be a windfall for some in the content industries, but it is hard to see how it would advance the fundamental purpose of copyright law. I am not at all in favor of illegal file-sharing, but the chilling effect this draconian increase in potential liability could have on legal activities seems to outweigh the benefit it could provide. It is already the case that many people are unwilling to exercise their legal rights because of the scare-tactics used by content owners to prop up their failing business models.
The other major purpose of the PRO IP Act is to create two new bureaucracies in the federal government — a “White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative” and a new division in the Justice Department dedicated to IP enforcement. The former office seems to be modeled on the US Trade Representative as an adviser to the President and watchdog over US interests abroad. It is not clear whether there has been some felt need for these additional offices outside of the desire by the big entertainment industries to have as many bureaucrats arguing on their side in the copyright conflicts as possible.
There are comments on PRO IP, as well as some links, here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation site.
Worth noting — a public domain search engine December 8, 2007
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Copyright in the Classroom , 2commentsAppropedia.org, which describes itself as “the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development,” has made available, in cooperation with Google, a beta version of a “public domain search engine.” The purpose, of course, is to help people find public domain material that they can use freely, without having to worry about copyright restrictions. Since such material can provide source for education, creativity and economic development, this project fits well into the self-defined mission of Appropedia.
It appears that the search engine focuses primarily on U.S. government material, which is in the public domain from the moment it is created. They have a nice explanation here of how they have gotten to the point of beta launch and where they hope to go. While this is a good start, there is a wealth of public domain material beyond the reach of this plan. Like the Google book search, this project is limited by the difficulty and expense of discovering what is and is not in the public domain. Ironically, while this search engine focuses on federal government materials, the Google Book project treats most government material as copyrighted works, since its definition of the public domain is limited to material published before 1923. Both definitions are radically narrow, and they emphasize the need to revise our copyright law to make the many works that are likely in the public domain (many so-called Orphan Works never had their copyright renewed, for example) easier and safer for the public to use.
In the meantime, however, this search engine, along with the more robust ability to search for material licensed under the Creative Commons licenses, offer great tools for helping scholars, teachers and others escape the straitjacket of our overly restrictive copyright law.
Student rights and academic values September 21, 2007
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Copyright in the Classroom , add a commentThe policies of the
CCLearn August 3, 2007
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , 1 comment so farThe Creative Commons, the organization behind the increasingly-ubiquitous Creative Commons licenses, has recently announced the formation of a new division, CCLearn. The stated goal of CCLearn is to minimize the legal, technical and social barriers that impede the sharing and reuse of educational materials.
Towards this end, one of the activities of CCLearn will be to encourage those who create educational resources to make them available free of legal and technical barriers that discourage adaptation and creative reuse. The Creative Commons license, by which creators can waive their copyright claims as long as their works are used for non-profit educational purposes, is a major tool toward creating such “open educational resources.” So a major initiative of CCLearn will be to encourage those who create education resource to employ CC license or some similar mechanism to communicate their desire to share those resources with the educational community.
Equally important, of course, is the ability to find resources that are made openly available for educational purposes. An important aspect of CCLearn will be its Open Education Search, a tool that “aims to direct search engine traffic to the incredible diversity of OER repositories and communities.” This tool should make it much easier for faculty members to find resources they can use in their classes without having to worry about copyright concern. It is a frequent and bitter observation that our system of copyright law does not accommodate the needs of education very well, even as it relies on institutions of higher education for much of the material that populates that system. Careful attention as CCLearn develops its open education search tool is called for; it promises a system that could offer both a potential solution to some of these copyright problems and an immense resource for creative approaches to teaching.
“A Disgrace to the Forces of Evil” May 29, 2007
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright in the Classroom, Fair Use , 1 comment so farAlthough it is available from lots of sources, I can’t resist adding a reference to the “A Fair(y) Use Tale” video to this site. This 10 minute remix video, constructed entirely from Disney cartoons, offers a very clever explanation of copyright and fair use while at the same time asserting the latter as the justification for the whole creation. It could provide a valuable resource for teaching students about copyright and fair use; its evident bias in favor of aggressive fair use provides a needed balance to the one-side educational material offered by the content industries.
The video, which was created by Bucknell professor Eric Faden, is available on YouTube, of course, or through the Stanford University Center for Internet and Society web site (which is the link provided above). The presence of Stanford Law School as a host site may prevent the promiscuous use of take down notices to suppress this amusing and important work; as the video itself says, Disney is notorious for using its copyright to intimidate others and Stanford may be indicating its desire to push back some against that practice.
Be sure to read the “FBI Warning” at the beginning of the video; it is not at all what we are used to seeing on commercial videos. And listen for the quote used to title this post, which is part of the explanation of fair use.
