The acquistion of YouTube by Google Video has a lot of people talking about the potential for copyright lawsuits. Discussions point to YouTube’s lax take-down policy fitting with Google’s bold stance around copyright (ex: Google Print). Meanwhile, Google and YouTube are making licensing deals with media companies.
This has me thinking about how this influences education’s dilemma with Fair Use policy, a top hurdle to making coursecasts available to the public.
Removing music and video from lecture videos is straightforward. Slide images are a bigger problem. Before posting lecture videos to Berkeley on Google Video we worked closely with faculty to scrub and/or replace slides, and secured permissions when possible.
This obviously doesn’t scale, and risks the pedagogical integrity of the lecture.
The strategy going forward is to educate faculty in copyright in the age of internet distribution. To work up front to find copyright alternatives. To have designers help to recreate copyrighted slides.
This a major reason why audio-only podcasting has been so successful: no images to scrub. Evidence the amount of material available through Berkeley on iTunes U.
Most schools simply avoid the problem by keeping the content behind a firewall for only enrolled students to access. For additional “security”, the content is streaming only.
Podcasting kicks this door down. It’s nature is downloading. It forces information to be free. Streams can be ripped — correction — streams are ripped. Obscured podcast feeds can be submitted to iTunes.
Now imagine daylighting archives. I visited our tape archive the other day, gazed at the racks and racks of tape dating back to 1-inch, and shook my head. Malcolm X speaks on campus. James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, the list goes on for every subject. And the archives exist in every educational and cultural institution.
It’s time for a digital Free Speech Movement.
So what’s it going to take? Everyone is waiting for some precedent-setting move to open the floodgates.
It could be a single institution as a test case adopting a reactive take-down policy.
Or look for higher-ed partnerships with a media/tech company to negotiate deals with textbook publishers and media producers. A risk here is that these partnerships might entail some kind of exclusivity.
A blanket deal with rights holders as the BBC Creative Archive talks about hold promise. I doubt that a single higher-ed institution could accomplish similar, but perhaps a consortium of higher-eds in conjunction with an umbrella open content group.
I anticipate a breakthrough. Meanwhile, institutions need not wait to digitize their AV archives for long-term preservation and to ready them for online access. This was a driver for libraries and Google Print. Do this for video, and wait…
Once freed, there will instantly be much more content for use and re-use. This will dramatically speed up the promise of education online.
October 16, 2006 at 6:05 pm |
You’ve got a great point. A/V archives? How much university-produced media does the average larger university hold, I wonder? Wow.
Let’s take that Allen Ginsberg lecture for example. What steps would Berkley have to take to post it? Clear the rights through the Ginsberg estate?
I admire Google’s “opt-out” approach in a lot of ways, but it has IP lawyers out for blood. Two potential pieces of legislation that could help: Orphan works bill and SIRA, copyright act 115. They may be bundled together in something called the Copyright Modernization Act of 2006.
And if you ever need mass-transcoding help, let us know. We’d love to liberate Malcolm from the crates.
October 23, 2006 at 5:23 pm |
[...] Now imagine daylighting archives. I visited our tape archive the other day, gazed at the racks and racks of tape dating back to 1-inch, and shook my head. Malcolm X speaks on campus. James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, the list goes on for every subj … Posted by obieDo you agree that post is interesting?Link to original article [...]