Infringement of Copyright

I have in the past delivered a fair few workshops on Copyright for JISC Collections, at ALT-C and across the country.

One question I am sometimes asked is “how easy is it to get caught” and “what will they do”. Most cases I know of which involve FE have been settled way before it gets to the court (or the press); however now and again cases involving copyright infringement do come to court.

This case is interesting because of the defendent, well they should know better, and the accusation that they ignored the concerns of the company involved.

FTS said it raised its copyright concerns with West Yorkshire Police in late 2006, but that the force and Hirst went on to repeat the alleged infringement in a 2007 update to their software, dubbed OLiVE. The package was made commercially available.

The issue with infringement of copyright is that the law is complex and surrounded by myths, so it is easy for any educaition provider and the staff who work there to at some point infringe copyright. They may do so accidently, they may do so thinking that they are okay too, or in extreme cases deliberatly infringe copyright. An institution needs to consider how it will react to any concerns that arrive at their door over cases of infringement of copyright. The key thing that you shouldn’t do, is ignore it and hope it will go away.

e-Learning Stuff Podcast #019: W.. W.. W.. W.. Wikipedia

Is Wikipedia a evil place we should ignore, or a useful resource for our learners?

James, Nick and Lisa discuss the merits and challenges of using Wikipedia, and provide advice and guidance on how and when it should be used by practitioners and learners.

This is the nineteenth e-Learning Stuff Podcast, W.. W.. W.. W.. Wikipedia.

Download the podcast in mp3 format: W.. W.. W.. W.. Wikipedia

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

James is joined by Lisa Valentine and Nick Jeans.

Shownotes

• The Scots language version of Wikipedia.
• The Copyright Activity mentioned in the podcast

Copyright and e-Learning, an introduction

Dr Jane Secker, talks about her book Copyright and E-learning: A Guide for Practitioners by Facet publishing.

Sounds interesting.

Royalty Free Film Music

Film and media students often like to create their own films or edit other people’s films. When making their own films, they would often use a piece of popular music or a film soundtrack and add it to their films.

In the olden days before everyone has access to the internet and online video sites such as YouTube and Blip.tv it wouldn’t matter that media and film students would infringe copyright as it was very unlikely that anyone apart from the student and their lecturer would view the video.

Edit: Just to note that it mattered then as it matters now that students infringed copyright. When I said wouldn’t matter what I was thinking was that staff and students then wouldn’t worry about infringing copyright as they perceived the risk of being caught very low and as a result wouldn’t worry about infringing copyright. But it was as wrong then as it is now, just now the risk of being caught is higher.

However these days students are not only making films, they also want to show them off. They are uploading them to YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and loads of other places on the internet.

As a result it is much easier for rights owners to find that the students have infringed their copyright. Regardless of your views on this, it can make life easier for the student, the lecturer and the college to have a source of music for these student films that does not infringe someone’s copyright.

They can of course seek permission from the copyright owner and this may be given or asked to pay a royalty.

The following is not copyright free, but you don’t need to pay royalties, just need to credit.

Lots of wonderful film type music.

From the FAQ

Can I use this music in a Student Film? Commercial Film? Stage Production? Flash Animation? Instructional DVD? Relaxation CD? Slideshow?

Yes. Anything and everything – as long as I get a credit.

Used it myself in a little film I made about the ALT Conference Dinner.

Great source of music for film projects.

Can I show a pre-recorded DVD in the classroom?

Disclaimer: ALL information containing in my post is for informational purposes only and should never be construed as legal advice. For proper legal advice you should consult a lawyer.

So here is a question which staff often ask. Can I show a pre-recorded DVD in the classroom? In other words a DVD which has been rented from a video store, or a DVD purchased from a retail store? In the olden days we would have called this a video cassette.

Under the Copyright Act, you can show a DVD in a classroom for the purposes of instruction without needing an additional licence.

If it is for entertainment purposes then you do need a public performance licence.

From the Government Intellectual Property Office.

“Performing, playing or showing copyright works in a school, university or other educational establishment for educational purposes.  However, only teachers, pupils and others directly connected with the activities (does not generally include parents) of the establishment are in the audience.  Examples of this are showing a video for English or drama lessons and the teaching of music.  It is unlikely to include the playing of a video during a wet playtime purely to amuse the children.”

From Filmbank.

“A copyright licence is required to screen films in educational institutions under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (UK), if the film is being screened for entertainment purposes rather than for the purposes of instruction or as part of the lesson.”

Not a lot of people know this.

Part of the misunderstanding arises as generally when you play a DVD you get this huge legal message indicating that your DVD is for personal use only and can not be played on oil rigs, in prisons, schools and colleges.

That is partly true for the purposes of entertainment and you would need to purchase a licence to show a DVD for that purpose.

However for informational and instruction (ie for educational reasons) it is possible to show that DVD in a classroom. Teachers and lecturers have a statuory right (it is enshrined in law, the Copyright Act to be precise).

So could you rip that DVD and put it on a laptop or on the VLE?

Ah no.

Ripping a DVD would be in breach of the EU Copyright Directive which “prohibits circumvention of copy protection measures“. So ripping the DVD is a criminal offence.

Photo source.

Can I legally download a movie trailer?

Disclaimer: ALL information containing in my post is for informational purposes only and should never be construed as legal advice. For proper legal advice you should consult a lawyer.

Imagine the scenario if you can, you are a Media Studies teacher. You wish to use some movie trailers in a classroom session, so that the learners can analyse the content and structure of the trailers and compare the features and similarities between each one.

Now you could use a computer suite and each learner could access the relevant movie site and view the trailer online. However this doesn’t really help as the video plays once and sometimes you want to see part of the trailer again and again. Now if only the learners could download the trailer, or even better could the teacher download the trailers and make them available to all the learners via a local network server, so enabling fast and easy access.

Well technically this is possible, however is it legal?

There are many tools available online which allow you to download videos from sites such as YouTube (usually through a Firefox extension or similar). They basically “scrape” the code for the video link from the website and then download the video file, providing you with a Flash based FLV file, some tools will convert this on the fly into an AVI or WMV if required.

However this article makes for interesting reading on the legality of doing this.The website in question (which is quite a respected tech blog) had given instructions on how to use video downloading tools to download streaming video from a site such as YouTube.

From the article YouTube states quite clearly that:

Currently, YouTube is a streaming-only service. We do not permit users to download the videos we host on our site. We believe our Terms of Use are clear on this point, but in light of the confusion which came to our attention today we are considering revisions to our Terms of Use to avoid any further confusion. It is important to many of our users who have uploaded and licensed content to YouTube that their content is authorized for streaming-only.

If a site streams a video to you, generally you don’t have the right to download that video as they are only making the video available as a stream.

Media-Convert.com which I have mentioned before, use to do this via it’s web based video conversion service, enter the YouTube URL and before you could say “is this legal” you would have a video in the format of your choice. They were soon stopped from doing this.

So downloading a streamed Flash based video is not an option, what about Quicktime based trailers from the Apple website?

For personal use, I can use Quicktime Pro on a Mac (and on Windows as well). What Quicktime Pro allows you to do is to save a Quicktime video to your hard drive. Once the trailer has loaded onto my computer in the browser I can save a copy to my hard disk for later viewing. I can even download the 1080p HD versions which look very nice even if they don’t fit on my computer screen as it’s too BIG.

Quicktime Pro is not the free video viewer but the paid for upgrade, which is about £12 per license for educational users (it’s £20 for “normal” individuals). There are other things you can do with it as well, I use it for making video and audio recordings on my Mac for example. I have also used it to trim audio recordings and some of the export functionality does make life easier…

Note the term “personal use”, most film trailers online are only available for personal use only. I would be surprised by any movie site which would allow a teacher to download movies for use in the classroom.

Apple in their terms of use for example make it quite clear what you can and can not do with any trailer you download from their website:

…no Content may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, publicly displayed, encoded, translated, transmitted or distributed in any way (including “mirroring”) to any other computer, server, Web site or other medium for publication or distribution or for any commercial enterprise, without Apple’s express prior written consent.

This would mean downloading and distributing it to students in a classroom situation would be viewed as illegal unless you had the permission of the movie trailer copyright owner.

Similar guidance is available on most other movie sites I checked. For example on Warner Brothers website is says:

You may access and display Material and all other content displayed on this Site for non-commercial, personal, entertainment use on a single computer only. The Material and all other content on this Site may not otherwise be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, distributed or used in any way unless specifically authorized by WB Online.

You could write and ask for authorisation and permission, sometimes this may be given, more often than not it won’t.

Legally students could download their own individual copy for their own analysis. However this may not always be possible, especially if you have network congestion or a slow internet connection.

So is there a solution, well yes, if you go for an alternative solution which is forgot online and go back to broadcasting.

Now an easier way would be to digitally record the trailers from the TV and use digital copies of them. You won’t even need an ERA licence, as the ERA does not cover adverts from the TV. Though if the trailers are part of say a film programme then these programmes probably are covered by the ERA licensing scheme and appropriate action should be taken accordingly.

However if it is an advert, under the Copyright Act you have a statutory right (therefore can not be taken away from you) to show recordings of TV broadcasts for educational purposes.

From the ERA website.

Are there broadcasts I can’t record under the ERA Licence?

Yes, only broadcast material owned or represented by ERA Members is licensed through the ERA Scheme for off-air recording. This means that some contents of certain broadcasts and material included in them, such as advertisements, are not covered by the Licence because ERA Members do not own or control the rights in them.

However, if you record these broadcasts for non-commercial educational purposes, your recordings in the ways relevant to the ERA Licence will not infringe copyright, unless a certified Section 35 licence applies. This is because Section 35 (1) states that where works are not covered by a certified scheme, then educational establishments may reproduce and communicate them electronically on-site without infringing copyright. You will need to adequately acknowledge, i.e. label, any broadcast recordings you make under Section 35 (1).

Also worth look at the ERA restrictions as well.

I have made recording just like this using an EyeTV device on a Mac (I have also used a Windows Media Centre as well, but never again…) I just set the video to record for a few hours (takes GB of space mind you) and then go through the adverts until I find the one I want (or one that’s similar). For movie trailers I would recommend recording the adverts during film programes on ITV or Channel 4, or during films.

If you do have an ERA licence then recording film programmes will help, as some of these will have trailers in them.

My Elgato EyeTV device captures from Freeview so I get a really good quality digital video file, it’s roughly the same quality as DVD. The editing tools make life really easy well to trim and edit the video you need. There are Windows TV Capture devices, some of them are just small USB sticks which slot into any USB port.

Though there are legal barriers that are getting in the way of the learning here, there are also solutions as well.

Photo source.

Live at the MoLeNET 2008 Conference

Decided to broadcast my question to the MoLeNET 2008 Question Time panel live over Qik. I was asking the question how should colleges address services such as Qik, Flickr and YouTube in regard to privacy, data protection and copyright. All views expressed are those of the individuals only.

more about "Live at the MoLeNET 2008 Conference", posted with vodpod

Ripping CDs may be made legal

Here in the UK it is (still) illegal to rip a CD to your computer (so when using iTunes or Windows Media Player you are technically breaking the law if you import a CD).

However the BBC reports that this may soon change…

Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.

Millions of people already “rip” discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law.

This is of course of those things that we do on a regular basis, but is in fact still illegal, I would suspect most people don’t even realise it is illegal.

Copyright Solutions Workshop

Today I ran a copyright workshop at the RSC SW VLE Forum in Taunton.

An interactive version of the workshop can be found online at the JISC Collections website.

Useful links

UK Intellectual Property – Government-backed home of UK Intellectual Property on the Internet. Resources on Copyright, Designs, Patents and Trade Marks.

CLA – The Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. The CLA is a non profit-making company that licenses organisations for photocopying and scanning from magazines, books and journals.

NLA – Newspaper Licencing Agency. The NLA operating on behalf of the UK’s national and regional newspapers the NLA licenses organisations to take legal copies of newspaper articles;

Crown Copyright – Guidance on the use of Crown copyright protected materials.

JISC Legal – a free information service offering high quality legal information to further and higher education relating to the use of information and communications technologies.

Creative Commons provides free tools for authors, artists, and educators to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.

Showing Digital Video Recordings

Here in the UK in order to show television recordings to your students you may need a licence, this is run by the Educational Recording Agency (ERA).

One thing I have found that a lot of people don’t realise is that the ERA licence only covers specific broadcasts from the following broadcasters.

BBC television and radio
ITV Network services (including ITV2 and ITV3)
Channel Four and E4
Five television
S4C

It does not include for example films or adverts or commercial radio.

However this is not an issue (except for labelling purposes) to quote the ERA:

However, if you record these broadcasts for non-commercial educational purposes your recordings will not infringe copyright, unless a certified Section 35 licence applies. This is because Section 35 (1) states that where works are not covered by a certified scheme, then educational establishments may reproduce and communicate them electronically on-site without infringing copyright. You will need to adequately acknowledge, i.e. label, any broadcast recordings you make under Section 35 (1).

So you can record adverts for showing for instructional purposes, or as one college I am aware of recorded The Terminator for a media lesson, without needing a licence.

Note to those who wish to hold digital recordings of tv shows, the ERA licence for ERA licenced recordings only covers the on-site computers and therefore you can not stream to students at home for example.

Digital recordings stored on-site, e.g. on an establishment’s central server, may only be accessed from on-site terminals. A suitable security or password protection system needs to be in place to ensure recorded material is not accessed by students at home or anywhere off-site, as this is not permitted under the ERA Scheme or any part of Section 35.

Usual disclaimer applies, all material in this posting is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. In all copyright matters, consult a legal expert or lawyer.