The letter may be limited, but the spirit is pretty great. Of course, what we really need is Lawrence Lessig to co-serve as the head of the FCC and next Chief Justice.

That said, didn’t Educational Fair Use cover much of this already? Also, any thoughts on using something like KeepVid and QuickTime to edit clips?

I’m certainly not an expert, but my reading of the details of the new ruling is that is does *not* apply to K-12 teachers: “The Register agrees with NTIA that proponents of a class extending to teachers and students in the K-12 setting have not proven their case.” This quote is from page 65 of the detailed recommendations to the Library of Congress from the Register of Copyrights:

I attended a copyright presentation at ISTE 2010 which was good and referenced “The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education:” I left that presentation with the understanding that Fair Use rights does not trump the DMCA.

I hope either my interpretation is incorrect or this changes soon since I can’t imagine queuing several DVDs to show various clips when introducing a new topic in physics class since I don’t have a Hi-8 camcorder :)

@Geoff

That’s very helpful. Thanks for clarifying Educational Fair Use vs. the DCMA. With the former, it’s my understanding that it applies only to in-person teaching. Do you know whether there’s an implicit agreement that, with new technologies, it extends to online learning as well?

I often embed clips from YouTube and other sources in Mathalicious lessons, and am concerned that I’m not concerned enough. At the same time, any thoughts on the marketing aspect of this? Have you seen a company actually go after someone who’s using their copyrighted materials for legitimate educational purposes? Seems like it might not be worth the risk of potentially looking like a jerk, no?

Karim, US Copyright Law itself has explicit exemptions for education in Section 110(1) and 110(2); the latter may apply to online learning:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#110

Fair Use is a different part of the copyright act and is not limited to educational use or even non-commercial use. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education explains Fair Use much better than I can:

http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-media-literacy-education

Again, while I’m certainly not a Fair Use expert, some of the key considerations for Fair Use to apply that were presented at ISTE are that the use is transformative and the societal benefit is greater than the cost to the copyright holder. According to the presentation there has never been an educational-focused Fair Use challenge. Stanford maintains a list of Fair Use cases:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-c.html

Some works provide alternative licenses, such as Creative Commons, which explicitly grants varying permissions for use:

http://creativecommons.org/

@Michael Paul Goldenberg,

I wouldn’t go so far as helping you rip dvds, because I am still unsure of the legalities and use; however, I have a quick little tutorial on ripping online streaming video on my site @ http://www.teacherthink.com/teacherthink-journal/2010/7/5/download-youtube-videos-a-howto.html

Also, I will be posting on how to get anything streaming using Safari’s Activity Window feature soon.

Thanks Dan for a great discussion!

Jeff @TeacherThink

TED.com has something about how YouTube approaches copyright laws in a speech by an employee from the company, which seem to be legal.

Now if only they would get some more sense knocked into them and make it legal to bypass encryption for all fair uses… (Or better yet, repeal the anti-circumvention clause all together.)