Lewis Hyde (Berkman Center Fellow) and Pat Aufderheide (Center for Social Media)

The photo above was taken at yesterday morning’s working group session tltled “University Agenda for Fair Use” at the Internet & Society 2007 (IS2K7) conference at Harvard, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

I was particularly interested in this session because it was a continuing on our recent efforts to better understand the range of technical and legal challenges facing educators within open academic media publishing.

Here are some of my brief notes from the working group session:

How do you (educators and media artists) use copyrighted material in your work?

The Center for Social Media is working with Renee Hobbes to develop a document to understand how the practices are impacting their educational capacity. The doc will be coming out in the fall. They are looking to develop a code of practice that will spill over into other disciplines.

Lewis Hyde says that it’s important to start with the use community and not the law. The law is to vague. Best to start with real examples and work from there.

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Fair use issues facing organizations and educational institutions from small working group session:

How are rights to fair use going to enable content distribution and at the same time enable rights to compensation? Is the university a protected space or should it be a protected space when it comes to media sharing?

There a blanket licenses for performances. Why can’t there be that blanket licenses for fair use in the classroom?

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Reportbacks and last half of working group session:

Do creators understand what they can do and what they can’t do? What happens when they take in-class uses and bring them outside the classroom? In-class use is non-infriging, but out of class use will be infringing?

Need to look at specific cases within different academic disciplines to come up with reasonable touch-stones for evaluating what is fair use?

Looking for something that would provide (fair use) guidance for academics.

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