UCLA Profs Banned From Posting Course Videos 134
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "As of Winter Quarter 2010, UCLA professors will no longer be able to post videos on their course websites. Although they've long relied upon fair use protections for educational use, the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab. Even though they believe their use of the materials to be fair, the UCLA has decided to back down rather than face litigation. Many professors have commented that this will hurt students, because they now have to watch all videos at the IML, which isn't open on weekends, forcing students to try to fit assigned videos between classes."
Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:5, Insightful)
Although they've long relied upon fair use protections for educational use, the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab.
That may be the case now but according to the article, that was the specific problem. That they were using Video Furnace to post videos online so students could view the videos outside of the IML which has horrible hours like being closed on weekends. From one of the students:
"If we want students to write a paper on the film over the weekend, it’s more convenient for the student to rewatch the movie online over the weekend. (The ban) makes teaching cinema more difficult (because) Video Furnace was extremely useful," Gans said. "I very much hope (the university) will reach some kind of agreement."
It seems they licensed Video Furnace for use of its technology only on campus and only on campus machines. But the ease of use means that if you post a Video Furnace movie on your course website then students -- or maybe even anyone -- could access it using a browser from anywhere. The summary link says that this may work but is not recommended due to possible latency from the server.
The ACLU backed down because, well, the university is probably violating its licensing agreement with Video Furnace. The professors don't do licensing so they didn't understand that what they were doing was wrong. The solution is to threaten to leave Video Furnace unless they amend their licensing contract or give you a way to convert to an open format that the professors can post where ever they want -- once you have the raw video, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. It's been shown that free online courses don't hurt enrollment anyway [arstechnica.com].
Fair Use (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to get a new edition of the Legal Dictionary, the one with the correct interpretations of words you THOUGHT you knew, like Common Law, and Common Sense.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts (Score:4, Insightful)
What a curious definition of "promote" we've arrived at.
Videos? In college? (Score:2, Insightful)
What sort of videos are we talking about? The only videos I've ever watched in an educational setting were pointless time wasters intended to give the teacher a break. If that's what we're talking about, they have a point. But there's really no loss as they're a waste of time anyway.
If we're talking about video recording of lectures given by professors, then the professors should have the copyright and should be able to distribute them any way they want. This would be far more useful than some generic educational video anyway.
Re:Fair Use (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't those two basically a dichotomy when it comes to copyright law and the like?
Granted, there may have been other issues involved here (e.g. licensing) but the issue that is presented seems reasonable enough for it to be silly to threaten the profs/university.
Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A (Score:5, Insightful)
What a curious definition of "promote" we've arrived at.
It's actually pro-mote. As in "in favor of dust". As in the progress of science and useful arts should collect dust if it's not making some business (read: MY business) money.
Open IML on the weekends (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excellent, two thumbs up! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not by taking to the streets, by taking to the boardrooms (and courtrooms and congress chambers). In 20 years, the generation that grew up loathing the copyright moguls will be the ones making the decisions, and I'd be willing to bet that they'll make their decisions a little differently than the groups that are in charge now.
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:4, Insightful)
And then - people are surprised that the quality of education is getting worse.
The copyright and patent issues seems to put a blanket over everything, so soon is the western world going down the drain while countries where copyright and patents are weak will outpace the western world.
RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary almost makes it sound like professors can't put up videos of their own lectures. But that's not what this is about at all. It's about professors not being able to put up other people's video. It even mentions a cinema professor. e.g. "Hey, we're gonna watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tonight and talk about it tomorrow. Oh, you can't come tonight? No problem, I'll just put the movie up on the class website." It's not exactly shocking that someone objected to that.
Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck? There are Americans out there who are willing to pay $40,000 a semester just to watch some goddamn "educational" videos? Is this for real?
Back when I was in college, I wasn't paying anywhere near that much, but you'd better fucking imagine that I got my money's worth by dealing with the professors and making sure they were teaching me directly, and not just telling me to watch some cockbiting "supplementary videos" or any fancy shit-in-my-pants like that. Fuck.
Kinda hard to teach film without, you know, watching films.
Kinda like teaching literature without reading books.
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it does.
But when you have the money and will to sue anyone whose fair use you don't like, you get to make the rules and the law be damned.
And now that industry groups like AIME and RIAA can dump millions into swaying elections with impunity, they probably won't even have to go to the trouble of taking anyone to court, because even the smallest copyright "infringements" will become criminalized rather than a civil matter.
That's their holy grail: to make all intellectual "property" "infringement" a felony, no matter how small, and to wipe out once and for all the notion of "fair use".
Watch for public libraries to start closing then. My guess is they'll open up low cost, privatized "ebook libraries" where the the ebooks will self-destruct via DRM after a short time. They'll say this approach is "better than libraries". The privatization of the public library system is coming to America. Bet on it.
Re:Excellent, two thumbs up! (Score:5, Insightful)
In 20 years, the generation that grew up loathing the copyright moguls will be the ones making the decisions, and I'd be willing to bet that they'll make their decisions a little differently than the groups that are in charge now.
You'd lose that bet. Back in the seventies we were a new generation with new ideas. The old sexual taboos were gone, nobody called a loose woman a "slut" because they all were as "slutty" as we men, marijuana was going to be legal as soon as the dinasaurs were out of power.
Then came AIDS and free love went out the window. My generation is now in power, and guess what? Those in power are the same kinds of assholes that were in power when my dad was younger than I am now, and I no longer see pot being legal "any day now".
It's not a generational war, it's a class war, and you and I are on the losing side.
Re:Excellent, two thumbs up! (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Why don't we look at the previous generation? The same boomers that participated in Woodstock ended up voting for Reagan and Bush. So you can't expect that sort of attitude to remain
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but given that this is EDU and likely won;t impact market as clause 4 indicates means that it should apply as fair use (IANAL either), textbooks on the other hand would have clause 4 severly impacted, thus fair use would not apply.
They're not showing them to everyone... (Score:3, Insightful)
> No problem, I'll just put the movie up on the class website." It's not exactly shocking that someone objected to that.
Actually, it's still pretty unreasonable, because the videos on the class website are only available on campus [ucla.edu] and not (easily) saved (unless you have a stream ripper for media furnace or something). That link is in the submission, but it seems like people are busy pointing out that the videos in question are commercial videos that are class assignments (rather than videos of lectures) while ignoring the fact that they're not just distributing these videos to all and sundry. They're only letting students watch them.
Common Law is mostly irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
Common law is mostly irrelevant to copyright. Copyright is almost entirely statutory. (i.e. passed by the legislature rather than judge-made law that derives from centuries of doctrine in England). While there are some old cases (there was one between the AP and another news aggregator that was effectively a "scraper" of AP-published news content during WW1), for the most part the copyright law says whatever Disney pays your Congressman to make it say.