Minimizing Legal Risks in Digitization Projects

• Copyright
• Some things to keep in mind: ADA, NAGPRA, HIPAA, Rights of Publicity, Deeds of Gift
• Privacy, Censorship, and Pornography

PCLED

• Physical
• Copyright (applies to all)
• License (applies to signing parties)
• Encryption (DRM, passwords)
• DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act-illegal to tamper with technological protection measures)
• Exceptions
  • The big one is the exception allowing film and media studies professors to break protection on DVDs

It appears that before we digitize the IS projects we must make sure that the Catalogue has always said that the College can do whatever it wants with the ISs. If it has not, then we must contact the authors or the heirs to get permission. We should have students sign a non-exclusive perpetual license with the College. This might be put in the Catalogue and made very explicit to the students. Or we could have the students sign something just for IS.

We should check to see if we are insured possibly “advertising injury” against copyright infringement. Use of disclaimers and there are examples at http://memory.loc.gov and a take-down policy. Things which are not subject to copyright: Facts, Recipes, Ideas, Dedicated Work, Government Work, Expired. Copyright metro will guide you through the use of media in the classroom. TEACH allows the use of something like Moodle for video and audio delivery.

Anyway, I am in Pamona (a very nice area with mountains all around) at a NITLE sponsored workshop on copyright. I ran into Peter and Eric from the ITLAC conference in 2005 and have had dinner. The discussions start tomorrow but I’ve already got a lot out of it in the form of handouts which lead to the Copyright Information Center. This is a treasure trove of all things copyright. The two most useful documents so far appear to be the

• Public Domain Chart
• Fair Use Checklist

but there are a lot of other interesting looking things. There is also the flow chart for determining if permission is required (adapted with permission of Mary Minow).

I look forward to the discussions tomorrow.

• Students love p2p and in particular loved Direct Connect. It was safe because it was on a student computer acting as a server and it was IP authenticated. Students have a vast amount of shared social knowlwdge about what file sharing software is working and what wasn’t.
• They still buy CDs but it is not the default method of obtaining music. A CD purchase was a special event. Even when they had CDs they would burn and share the CDs.
• Some students looked at p2p as radio. These students wouldn’t buy music if there was no p2p. They would listen to the radio or burn CDs from friends.
• Students didn’t like Napster. Why?
  • The bands and songs they want aren’t there.
  • The songs won’t play on their iPod.
  • DRM
  • It was not as good as p2p.
  • Since they had free access they viewed it as p2p and for most it didn’t compare to other p2p programs.
• Student comments include, “If I can get it for free, why would I pay?”, “Why spend money when you don’t have to”, “Illeagal is so relative.”
• One student comment really summarizes the view of this generation. It boils down to the fact that they grew up in a time when they could get music for free and anything that makes it the least bit hard to get music leagally can’t compare to p2p.
• Some justifications include the fact that musicians have lots of money and they don’t need a poor student’s money. The justifications are not the result of concious thought by the file sharers but are just floating out there and latched onto by the students.
• Educational efforts from the industry are unconvincing because of the rich vs. poor perception.
• Recommendations
  • Don’t fight the battles for the students
  • Encourage the students to be responsible
  • Talk to the students
    • What do you do?
    • What do you want?
    • How do you think we can accomplish this?
  • Give them information like “Here is how to not get sued when using p2p”.

My take.

Can we encourage students to get political about this issue and work to change the laws surrounding copyright? In actuality the issue really is broader than music download and p2p. The issue is really about copyright and fair-use and their relavance or lack thereof on the Internet. We need to step back and work on this broader problem and see if it points to a solution for the p2p download problem. All-in-all a good session.

He also noted that the change in paradigm to a self service model that began with Amazon will make its way into education and we must be prepared to deal with this shift. As a faculty member, I’m not sure I’m ready for a self-service education model. I especially don’t see this from my Liberal Arts background.

Update: Cerf also asked how we will access these documents in a thousand years. I would say we already are facing this issue. There are people with Word v1 documents that have no way of accessing the content of the document. So librarians and archivists need to start working on a way to archive programs, operating systems, and possibily hardware so that we will be able to access the content of digital documents or they need to make XML or some other standard markup language the standard for storing digital information. With such a standard at worst we would lose the formating but we would still retain the contnet. TeX is such a system as is HTML and I am still able to access the content of my HTML documents eventhough the formatting has been lost with the advances in browser technology and Web standards.

Two references were given for information on Podcasting:

• http://web.mac.com/ipodcentral/iWeb/
• http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/podcasting/

The first gives some tools and examples of educational Podcasts.

The majority of the session focused on using Garageband 3 to produce an enhanced Podcast. An enhanced Podcast is one which contains video or stills. Garageband 3 makes it very easy to create enhanced Podcasts, but you can only have a single video or stills. You cannot have both stills and video in an enhanced Podcast created with Garageband 3 (or at least I haven’t figured out how to do it).

I had one idea for using enhanced Podcasts with our education department. Now they have a reading buddy. Each college student is paired with a third grader and they trade a paper book back and forth. The elementary students color, draw, and write in the journal and the college students respond in kind. I thought that at the end of the year it might be interesting to have the buddies meet face-to-face and turn the book into an enhanced Podcast by scanning the pages and putting them in as stills. Each person could record what they had written and the students would have something they could share with relatives far away. It would also help students identify errors in their writing as it is often easier to spot an error when listening to what you wrote.

The other idea that came out of the session was the OSU horticulture department’s introduction of blogging to students. They use a six step approach for WordPress:

1. Find a story and develop an abstract and post it
2. Same as 1 but also put in an in-line image
3. Same as 2 but put in an audio file
4. Same as 3 but use audio blogger (might use Skype?) to have them include their own audio
5. Do everything in 4 but pick your own story idea
6. Use Joomla to create a Web site and incorporate the content in the blogs

I am going to try to modify this and encourage Faculty to take a similar approach when incorporating blogs into their courses. Peter’s class was just sort of thrown in with a sink-or-swim approach, but the course is really all about technology and this approach is kind of appropriate.

The last part was about hosting, but we have that kind of worked out so I didn’t pay too much attention.

Update: Got another link from our Apple rep

• http://www.apple.com/education/resources/podcastingvideos/