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Comments: 134 + - Your Rights Online: UCLA Profs Banned From Posting Course Videos on Friday February 05, @09:39AM
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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."
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Submission: UCLA Profs Banned from Posting Course Videos by Anonymous Coward
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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].
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:5, Informative)
When you buy a DVD, it has an implicit license to the conditions under which you can watch it (That FBI warning at the beginning indicating you can't show it to a large audience). To comply with copyright law, an "instructional" DVD which permits showing to an audience is required. I am only aware of this because our design course shows the Nightline "Deep Dive" video [go.com]. If you look at the educational version (checkbox), it allows you to show to a group, but NOT to stream it. In order to stream the content, a difference license for the video would be required. I'm not sure how to get such a license right now, and this will be inconvenient for a few semesters worth of Bruins, but as demand for streamed instruction content grows, I'm sure viable licensing options will arise (as we have seen for music and popular video content).
Parent
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:5, Informative)
Fair use still applies to the whole movie:
US Code Title17, Chapter1, ss107 is crystal clear:
the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
-nB
Parent
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:4, Informative)
IANAL, and I am unclear on the full implications of the case law surrounding this, but clearly the interpretation cannot be so broad as you suggest. Otherwise it would be useless to copyright educational materials. Educational purpose is one aspect to be be considered, but (3) is also a significant consideration here. If you showed clips of a movie in a cinema class for the purposes of analysis and criticism, that would be fair use. To show the whole movie, you need an appropriately licensed version. Similarly, since the 90s universities (and students) have been paying royalties on papers included in course packs, even though these papers are clearly for educational purposes.
Parent
Re: (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.
Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous (Score:4, Informative)
...crystal clear:
Yes, it's pretty clear. It's your reading comprehension that's lacking. "The fair use... for such purposes as... is not an infringement..." does not mean that "any use... for such purposes... is fair use and therefore... is not an infringement..." The other requirements for fair use still apply even for such purposes.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When you buy a DVD, it has an implicit license to the conditions under which you can watch it (That FBI warning at the beginning indicating you can't show it to a large audience). To comply with copyright law, an "instructional" DVD which permits showing to an audience is required.
This is false. There is an explicit exemption for use of videos in the classroom. From 17 USC 110 (1) [copyright.gov]:
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;
However, this does not cover posting videos online, like UCLA was doing. IIRC (can't find a link right now), there have been cases where schools tried to include videos in distance learning classes, and the judge ruled that it was not fair use.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
However, this does not cover posting videos online, like UCLA was doing.
That would be 110(2), but it has a number of limitations to it, such that UCLA might not have qualified for it, depending on precisely what it had been doing.
And of course, where no other exception applies, and where the use would otherwise be infringing, fair use may always be raised as a defense. It might not succeed, as not every use is necessarily a fair use, but it might succeed, as any use is potentially a fair use.
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Surely the 'solution' would be for the customer, in this case the ACLU, to buy the correct licensing - not threaten the license holder...
Your suggestion smacks of 'wahhh I didnt buy what I should have but give it to me anyway!'
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You have a college education?
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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.
UCLA tuition is more like $5000/semester.
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.
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Law School Opportunity? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a better way to break in some law or pre-law students than to represent this case. Backing down benefits nobody but AIME and future precedent for online coursework.
Excellent, two thumbs up! (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this *exactly* what we want? Let the next generation get first-hand generation of the worse sides of copyright law. THEY are the ones who will tip the balance to actually change things as the older generation is phased out.
I hope they will remember this incident very well in their future careers.
Re:Excellent, two thumbs up! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
Not when they get a taste of the almighty Dollar (or Euro). They will then be turned to the dark side...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
"To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion."
Why should there be? It'd almost be like expecting most people to have a particular mental illness (with the implication that the mental illness is a good thing). The masses have been burned every time that they entertained revolutionary ideas, hopes, and passions of the sort promoted by Mr. Bakunin and his ilk.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts (Score:4, Insightful)
What a curious definition of "promote" we've arrived at.
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.
Parent
To clarify: (Score:5, Informative)
They are NOT talking about videos of the courses
The ban applies to videos assigned by professors for students to watch.
Previously these could be streamed and watched at student's leisure. Now they have to go to the media lab to watch them.
So negotiate a license with the copyright holders (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like just a 'simple' negotiating situation to me. UCLA should just refuse to buy or use any instructional videos which don't grant them a license to make the videos available to enrolled students and faculty online. If the copyright holders want to play hardball, play hardball. Heck, extend this beyond UCLA, and make it a State of California mandate for all state Universities in the California system. What instructional video publisher wants to be locked out of all California public Universities?
Re:So negotiate a license with the copyright holde (Score:2)
Yes, because Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama is a perfect substitute for Citizen Kane.
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 e
Re: (Score:2)
I took a lit class called "An Introduction to Vice" in which we read a bunch of Shakespeare plays (Othello==Rage, Merchant of Venice==Greed, etc) and watched 12 Hitchcock films. The films were an integral part of the course.
In high school and before, I can (sadly) see your point. But if you have a prof. showing a film in college and you consider it a pointless time waster, I think you went to the wrong school or took the wrong class.
-t.
How is this different from course readers? (Score:2)
Written material by others, namely, course readers, have to abide to copyright: there is no fair-use exemption that allows the readers to be made without paying the copyright holders, nor for faculty to copy textbooks.
Why should videos not done by the faculty be any different?
Not nearly as bad as the summary sounds (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't about a recording of a lecture that gets posted, this is about copyright protected videos that a professor shows during a lecture being posted.
So under this threat, a professor that shows "Steamboat Willy" in a class can not post "Steamboat Willy" onto the more accessible distribution system.
-Rick
Open IML on the weekends (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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)
Similar as with copyrights on scientific papers (Score:2)
The copyrights are NOT owned by the authors (the researchers, who did the experiments, compiled the results, came up with theories, ideas, formulas and supporting material, wrote the whole damn thing), but by the journal. Who gets all the revenue, too. The researchers get jack. And their work, since copyrighted, cannot be distributed to the humanity as a whole, even though that was the intention of the scientists.
Their mission statement.... (Score:3, Informative)
"The mission of AIME (pronounced “aim”) is to promote fair and appropriate use of the media and equipment delivering information in a rapidly changing world."
college executives are notorious wimps (Score:2)
'standards' based solution? (Score:2)
In my day... (Score:2)
I just don't get it. OK, so I went to college in the pre-Internet days, and times have obviously changed, but this really struck me:
Isn't part of the educational process (or life in general) getting people to be responsible with and accountable to their time? Or am I just part of an older generation?
H
Imagine books instead of video (Score:4, Informative)
Teacher: "Good morning, lit class. Next we'll be reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It's for sale at the bookstore. Go buy a copy and read the first 100 pages and we'll talk about it on Monday."
Student: "Buy?! I can't afford that."
Teacher: "Ok, well the library also has--"
Student: "Only one copy and Ralph here next to me already checked it out."
Teacher: "Ok, well, then, I'll just take my copy here over to the photocopy machine. Who all of you need a free copy?"
Student: "Me!"
Student: "Mee!"
Student: "Me too!"
Heller: "Brains!" [Kills teacher and eats brain.]
Student: "Why did you kill teacher?"
Heller: "Copyright infringement."
Student: "You're dead. Why do you care?"
Heller: "Need money buy brains."
That's a totally believable scenario. But change the book to a movie and suddenly people are surprised that someone's brain got eaten.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
When I was at university, we had to go to the lectures in person - not wait for them to come out on video. How times change.
I'm sure these aren't the lectures, or else there wouldn't be an intellectual property issue. Then there's the issue of online classes. I work in distance education, and have to put a lot of video in classes, because students don't attend a lecture. We embed them in our course management system (Moodle), so they're only accessible to our students, not just out in the wild.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would they not have the copyright to the movies of their classes? Is Video furnace a movie production company that comes in and videos the classes (av staff) or just some software used to create the movies?
Re: (Score:2)
I did read the article and it did not make sense to me. Maybe because I am unfamiliar with Video Furnace or whatever that is and how it works. The article never said who owned the copyright, who was threatening to sue. The group that notified the University seemed to be like RIAA for teachers, the Association for the Information Media and Equipment, can not be the copyrighter certainly, it is a non-profit membership organization offering copyright information and support to teachers, librarians, media cente