Teaching Comparative

Copyrights and teaching

Have you ever had qualms about handing out photo copies of newspaper articles? I have.

Did you, like me, ever wonder whether the FBI warning at the beginning of videos applied to you when you showed something to a class instead of your family?

Are the fair use and educational use of copyrighted material on the web different from the use of printed matter? What are the fair use rules anyway?

If I quote a copyrighted publication in this blog, is that legal? If you repost a blog entry on a web site for your class, is that legal? How about if you repost a blog entry I made that included excerpts from a newspaper article?

Enforcement is sporadic and rare, but the consequences are serious. The connections created by the Internet make the potential for enforcement greater. (Who is keeping track of what you read and download online?)


William McGeveran of the University of Minnesota Law School and William W. Fisher of Harvard University have written up a research project for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society that is relevant to our teaching.

The paper, "The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age," reports on a year-long study funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (The abstract is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923465 )

What the authors found, with the help of two expert workshops, was that confusion and structural complications limit the potential of "digital technology in education."

The paper "identifies four obstacles as particularly serious ones:

1. Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;
   
2. Extensive adoption of digital rights management technology to lock up content;
   
3. Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary;
   
4. Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators."

The paper's conclusions include suggestions for some types of reform that might improve the situation, "including certain types of legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution."

The first and last of the four obstacles are the ones that give me the most trouble. The confusion about fair use usually causes school administrators (as good bureaucrats) to take the most restrictive and limiting policy positions possible. That gives them some peace of mind about defending teachers' actions, but it can really deprive students of wonderful learning opportunities.

Thus, the sugggestions for improvements are important and realistic. One of those suggestions is "educator agreement on best practices." So, start this conversation with colleagues and begin describing the best practices.

If you go to the abstract page, you can find a link to download the whole paper. Most of us probably aren't vitally interested in the details, but perhaps we should be. Your local IT support people and the policy makers probably should read this. Maybe you should download this and pass it on to one of them.

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:28 AM