Video, Education, and the Law - CCNMTL Conference

Here my notes from some of Josh Nathan’s (Thirteen/WNET) talk during the “Video, Education and the Law” session at Day Two of CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

Traditionally the way that we negotiate rights are in terms of manner of media and terms of use. As well as exclusivity. The bottom line in negotiation is money.

The market and the price of those rights are driven on how we monetize viewership of video. Either a pay-to-view, or DVD sale, or rental, or preview supported by ads or sponsorship. And technology is changing viewership radically and quickly. The internet is now a high end video portal. iPods are offering a whole new format.

This change in viewership is changing how we monetize viewership. Print is spending 6 times its share on ads compared to the viewership of print. The internet is half. It’s going to be equal in the next 6 months within each category of media.

What’s happening in the commercial world is (going to help define) how we are to think about rights. With convergence all media will come into the home with one click. With these new models we are going to have really interesting new deals. A combination of pay-per-view and ad supported models.

No one is really quite sure how we are going to make money on all of this.

The web doesn’t tolerate borders. Territory over time is going to disappear. We’re going to think about defining rights in terms of end users. Are they at home, are they in the classroom, or in the theatre, etc., and how are they paying for it?

• How are we going to make money if our content is posted all over the place?

What does it mean for best practices? It’s a little early to tell. The bottom line is to tag and track our content. This ties into the educational market, because we need a way to have an archive and a way to manage an archive. That’s the big challenge for educational institutions and public broadcasters.

How are going to archive in the future? We need some changes in the law.

The law gives us free music for public broadcasting. How are we going to think about what public broadcasting means within copyright moving forward?

Classroom use of public broadcasting media should be available free of copyright restrictions.The critical thing is to remember that the big mover in the market is always money. Whatever we do, what are the commercial models and how can we take advantage of those models, as long as no one feels ripped off by those models?

During the Q & A, Josh responded to the question, “Is there a reasonable timeline for approaching Congress on this?” by saying it’s too early - because we don’t know what we want, yet. The whole notion of changing the copyright law (is a good idea for the long run, but not in the short term).

Rick Prelinger (in the audience) added, “This could be a world changing thing in the way that Google announced” its Book digitization project. “They changed the world and the world has been struggling to catch up. So, there’s that. This could be a world changing mission that could change expectations. How do you spin that?”

Rick went on to ask “Who makes it? The big changes don’t get made without disobedience. Google didn’t ask to start crawling the web. Permission v. forgiveness thing. The issue is did it force people on all sides of the issue to think about business models?”

Josh said that the important thing to remember in all this is that educational institutions’ needs should define how the law works.