A grey and contested area!

I’ve recently sought advice from a couple of fellow media educators regarding the legality of posting copyrighted audio and video material to sites on the internet such as YouTube, TeacherTube and blogs.

The first to reply was the Chief Examiner of A level Media Studies for a leading English awarding body and Head of Media Studies at a sixth form college widely regarded as a centre of excellence for the subject. As the Media Studies department at the college in question has posted a lot of copyrighted material on their website over the years, I wondered what their position on this issue was. Here is the reply I received:

It does infringe copyright, but in practice the worst that is likely to
happen is someone notifies YouTube and they shut down your account.

We have never had a problem with using music (e.g. for music video made
by kids) and as far as I am aware no-one has ever been prosecuted here
or in the US for it. Uploading clips you have ripped from DVD again is
unlikely to result in a problem, but as we discovered this year, can
result in your account being shut down; ours went when the BPI objected
to a clip ripped from the Brit awards programme which we had uploaded.
We had to start again from scratch and re-upload all videos.

My advice would be to carry on with kids’ work, but don’t use the same
account if you upload something you have ripped from elsewhere!

Further advice from a University lecturer in Media studies was as follows:

This is a grey and contested area and I am not a media lawyer (I would have a much bigger house and a car that is not literally falling to bits) so this is conjecture and not binding legal advice…

Having said all that, copyright law recognises a degree of educational purpose across the range of printed and media material. A number of sites have explanations for staff and students on this. I think that this is the statute that (the practitioner above) quotes and goes by:

“Sound and videorecordings and broadcasts may be copied for the making of a film or film sound-track by students and/or academic staff involved in the course of instruction, or of preparation for instruction, in the making of films or film sound-tracks. Note, this copying may only be done by the tutor(s) or the student(s) involved in the course.”

This quote is from Staffordshire University’s exhaustive library pages at http://www.staffs.ac.uk/legal/copyright/

educational_purposes/

This does not cover the uploading of any created, repurposed material to the web. On the other hand you are not exactly selling it on by displaying it for students to critique (or whatever). The case for educational use is usually made on the grounds of not-for-profit or resale and academic purposes only. So long as the college would not be compiling them and selling them on as a DVD (which would be a cast iron case for prosecution I reckon) then posting them for a while on your site ought to be OK.  If push comes to shove and an agent of whatever film company spots re-used copyright material, the usual recourse is to a letter or other communication requiring the removal of the material. So long as you have maintained control over that material and you can take it down if you need to, I think you would be covered. If you left it there, you might be sued!  As far as I know, (the practitioner above) retains control of the postings and could remove them.  I’m unaware of him ever having any difficulty with this.

Materials made available to you through the Creative Archive (BBC, Channel 4 etc) are explicitly available for use in the special Creative Archive agreement which can be found here: http://www.teachers.tv/creativearchive

BECTA has some further sorces of info here http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=is&catcode=ss_to_es_pp_le_03&rid=14159

So there we have it. A grey and contested area indeed!

Fair Use?

Having just posted a short clip from BBC Newsround on TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=3462e4ad1919e70ba11f), I’m aware that it may well be taken down if it is felt to be infringing copyright. This throws the whole issue of how practical the internet is for sharing content with students into question; teachers simply don’t have time to get permission for every little thing they post and I understand that many use the concept of “fair use” in their defence. I need to find out more about this.