Our topic today is deep-linking. A Texas 5th Circuit Court judge ruled in December that SuperCrossLive.com was violating copyright by linking directly to audiocasts of motorcycle racing rather than linking to the main page of the SFX Motor Sports site. The Judge said this practice did not constitute a “fair use” of the material. Does this mean anything for professors who link to images and stories on the New York Times’ site? Should I be telling them not to do this in their Moodle courses? I’m not sure. What do you think? Is an instructor doing this “fair use”?

The full article is here.

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.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer ran a story in its business section on Nov. 20th with the title “Professors get ‘F’ in copyright protection knowledge.” The main beef comes from book publishers who are upset that a growing number of professors are using excerpts and in many cases large excerpts of texts to create course packs and not requiring students to purchase books. It is another “fair use” interpretation issue. I am sure this will be on the agenda for the copyright workshop at Claremont.

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• 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.

• Freeplay Music
• Garageband.com

which provide a wide array of music that is for the most part free to be used in the types of projects students produce.

Denison’s AUP was structured so that we don’t have to amend it for new technologies, and so far, this seems to be working although clearly there will come a day when a technology disrupts that strategy.

Our AUP is modeled after that from The Ohio State University. I worked with Steve McDonald when he was counsel there (he’s at RISD now) and in the process found that more than 16 other institutions have modeled their AUP after that from OSU.

My guess is that it would make sense for us to examine OSU’s policy and adjust it to fit our needs.

• Acceptable Use Policy
• Podcast Policy
• Blogging Policy
• Web site Policy
• Privacy Policy
  ]]> http://jbreitenbuch.blogs.wooster.edu/2006/02/10/policies-governing-network-resources/feed/ http://jbreitenbuch.blogs.wooster.edu/2006/01/14/web-services-policies/ http://jbreitenbuch.blogs.wooster.edu/2006/01/14/web-services-policies/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:06:29 +0000 Jon Breitenbucher Policy http://jbreitenbuch.blogs.wooster.edu/2006/01/14/web-services-policies/ When it was time to release this blog server, I had a conversation with Anne Gates, Secretary of the College, about the Terms-of-Use and Privacy Policy I had adapted from Harvard Laws blog server. In the course of that discussion, it became clear that what was really needed was for a group to look at the policies governing all of our Web services and to make sure that any planned services were in line with the College’s Strategic Plan. Anne asked me to pull together a group to discuss this. The group consists of the Secretary of the College, the Director of Alumni Relations and The Wooster Fund, Associate Vice President of College Relations, the Chief Information Technology Officer, the Director of Instructional Technology, the Director of Web Services, and myself. We had our first meeting on this past Tuesday.
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