UCLA Professors Barred From Posting Video Online For Classes
from the can't-educate-unless-you-pay-up dept
Copycense points us to a story out of UCLA about how professors who, in the past, would post video segments online for their classes to watch, have been forced to stop due to claims of copyright infringement by the Association for Information Media and Equipment. You see, the whole educational fair use exception to copyright law apparently doesn't apply because the AIME says it doesn't (even though UCLA was pretty sure that fair use did apply), and it's causing problems for both students and teachers. UCLA still claims that its online video service was legal... but professors have been told to stop using it. Instead, they're sending students to UCLA's media lab to watch videos... but the lab has greatly reduced hours (including being closed all weekend) due to budget cuts. Isn't it great to see how copyright is "promoting the progress" by making it that much more difficult to educate our young leaders of tomorrow?Of course, just as I finished writing up the above paragraph, I came across a different story about how UCLA has created a portal of TV video content for students, basically aggregating authorized TV content from Hulu and YouTube so that students can access it all in a single interface. So, the university makes it easier to watch entertainment video... but educational videos? Too bad.
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Filed Under: copyright, education, ucla, video
Companies: aime, ucla
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http://www.aime.org/contact-us.php
and tell them how you are very upset at their thuggish actions.
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Seriously, how is this even any of the AIME's business. If I made a video and posted it on youtube and it had no copyright material, how is it your business or their business to tell me I can't violate copyright on my own video. Who's copyright is the school violating when they voluntarily post video of themselves. This makes no sense at all.
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http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1. html#110
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and why is it not lawful for a professor to make a video of himself teaching students in a class?
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and why is it not lawful for a professor to make a video of himself teaching students in a class?
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Read the whole paragraph 110 in the link above.
It is not lawful to make a video of a copyrighted work(literary, musical or filmographic) that was made from an illegal copy or by illegal means but it legal to do so otherwise but it needs to have been bought legally, it needs to take some steps, have no payment and in case of literally and musical works the copyright holder can object and have to fallow some rules to do so.
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I always have to laugh when you say something like this, because you are taking a phrase out of context and attempting to make a point, but in the end you fail.
There is nothing in copyright that says "promoting the progress of education", it is only to promote the progress of producing content etc.
I suspect if the university worked on it, and made the video available only to students, locked to the outside, etc, that they would be able to come to an arrangement with the rights holders.
Cutback at that media lab, well, that's the schools problem, not the copyright holders problem, right?
WTG Mike, another wild reach!
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"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
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Yeah, the arrangement would be something like..."Pay us lots of money or we'll just sue you."
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Do try to keep up, little troll man.
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> you are taking a phrase out of context and attempting to make a
> point, but in the end you fail.
No, he makes the point just fine. You just fail to get it.
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TAM - "it is only to promote the progress of producing content etc."
The copyright clause is there to keep knowledge open to the public. To allow people who have produced an idea for a "limited time" the ability to recoup their investment. That is the problem with people like you. Knowledge is not property, it never will be. Copyright was never meant to be a box to you had to pay for every time, for all time, you want to look inside. It is meant to help in the advancement of society by allowing a person to be rewarded for their accomplishments. It is there to allow our culture to grow and become something greater.
You just dont get it and never will.
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Forget the movies - dont buy them
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Re: Forget the movies - dont buy them
You obviously have never had to commute anywhere near UCLA. Online traffic is far more manageable than car traffic.
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in reply to "student body"
Continuing Education
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Well I just left a comment there ....
"The Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution states ... "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
How does this promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts? This is a university whose sole purpose is to promote science, the arts, and to educate"
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Keep in mind that many of the films are created expressly for the educational market and that many distributors offer licenses that permit online streaming. Is there no value for the work of the filmmaker or the investment of the educational distributor in new delivery technologies to meet the evolving needs of schools? Many other schools do take advantage of the digital licenses offered by content providers. So the argument seems to come down to the fact that some schools simply don't want to pay for it and rationalize that preference through pretextual justifications and hyperbole about fair use and the oppressive bullying tactice of fat-cat copyright owners. Fair use is a flexible, fact-specific defense, but it does not justify any use just because it is educational. In cases where content providers offer the universities alternatives such as licenses for streaming and where the infringements involve illegal copies of the entire work that undermine the entire economic market for the work, the fair use argument utterly fails.
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Anti-Mike = Useless
Keep going Mike!
I think the point of the article also was to point out the idiocy and unintended consequences of copyright.
Thanks Anti-Mike for missing that. Duh! =D
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Really, fair use works here
The original provisions of Sec. 110 of the Copyright Act, special educational exemptions, were never designed for the digital era, and the amendments to it provided under the 2003 TEACH ACT are crabbed and constrained, the product of tough negotiations between the relatively weak nonprofit entities and highly focused copyright holders. So as it stands, Sec. 110 is a poor fit for changing educational practice. Exclusive reliance on Sec. 110 can mislead librarians, professors and university counsels into an attempt to make practice conform to a rigid and unhelpful set of rules.
Far more useful is the flexible and adaptable doctrine of fair use, which is fully available to every teacher, and every college and university –in addition to and apart from Section 110. Judicial interpretation of this doctrine has coalesced dramatically in the last two decades, and has eliminated much confusion about how to interpret fair use. Two concepts are critical to make a fair use judgment: Transformativeness (using material for a different purpose than the original) and appropriateness (using enough to make the point). In many cases, videos posted to course sites by instructors will satisfy these fair use criteria easily.
In order to more easily make and defend fair use judgments, higher education doesn’t need more negotiated “guidelines” – an approach that, as documented by Kenneth Crews , has never served their interests well. But another, more fruitful, approach is available. Recently several communities of practice have formulated collective interpretations of fair use, or codes of best practices in fair use. These codes have dramatically reshaped practice in fields such as documentary film and media literacy education. They are used daily by online video makers who enthusiastically embrace fair use without legal harassment.
Four codes are of particular interest to higher education: the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ two codes of best practices (one on teaching and one on research), available on SCMS’s website; the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education ; and the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare . These codes discuss, for example, when the relevant community of practice regards it as appropriate to post others’ copyrighted material online, and how to reason about the amount of material appropriate to include.
What is needed is a collective interpretation of fair use for the higher education in general community (not and never a negotiated settlement with entities that have a record of opposing higher ed’s assertions of fair use!). Until that time, it will take acts of courage to resist bullying from copyright holders attempting understandably to maximize their advantage in a rapidly changing business environment. And that is another crying shame. Because no one should have to be courageous to use their rights. Professors and university general counsels should, like filmmakers , film scholars and media literacy teachers, be able to employ their fair use rights as a simple and ordinary part of their work lives.
Thanks to Prof. Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law, American University for a close legal read of this post!
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