Fair Use, Media and Education in the Digital Age

I was just watching a video at MIT World, titled “Copyright, Fair Use, and the Cultural Commons,” from MIT 5 earlier this year. After watching, “Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use,” played during the panel, I thought how powerful it would be to build a code of practice among educators with a particular focus on increasing access to teaching and learning materials in the digital age, similar to the current Copyright Confusion effort.

What’s so important about the Center for Social Media’s example is how it is moving outwards and being applied in sort of a step-wise fashion to other disciplines. This is a topic we discussed earlier this year at Berkman Center meeting in considering different concerns in a multi-disciplinary fashion. During our meeting, we also discussed how educators might join together to develop a similar statement in building an cross-institutional repository for open access educational material. There’s lots to learn from ongoing efforts in this area, including MIT’s OpenCourseWare, Connexions, Sakai, OER and many others.

I’m beginning my paper for this course and will be including a literature review on this topic. The paper builds on ideas found on this site and draws from resources on copyright, fair use, and open access in the digital age.

Following on the release of their 2005 “Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use,” the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University teamed up with Temple University’s Media Education Lab to present a new report this fall on “The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy.” The report hopes to bring together media literacy educators at the national level “to develop a code of practices” to articulate how fair use applies to their work (from the press release).

The study included interviews with “63 educators from K-12, university and college professors, and youth media professionals.” The project’s Co-Principal Investigators, Renee Hobbs, Peter Jaszi, and Pat Aufderheide reveal many different responses from educators about what they believe they can and can’t do under copyright law. Among other things, they found

“Teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms.”

Furthermore, the report shows that conservative statements on copyright policy created by academic institutions have created a culture of fear among educators that have made it difficult to use copyrighted material in the classroom. There are a number of cases in the report that exemplify this fear, including one that from a university professor who stopped “putting video clips of copyrighted material online,” even behind closed-walled (password-protected) course management systems because of “concerns about copyright violation.”

The Cost of Copyright Confusion reveals that the “pedagogical costs of studied ignorance, quiet transgression, and hyper-compliance are many.” In its conclusions and recommendations, the report states that media literacy educators need to take the first step and educate themselves “about the clear and unambiguous use rights” that copyright law provides. Second, the report shows

“There is an urgent need to develop and disseminate a code of practice for fair use of copyrighted material by media literacy educators, based on collective discussions about the ways in which educators actually do and reasonably could use such materials, consistent with the law.”

On October 26, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend a meeting in Boston with Renee Hobbs and Peter Jaszi, along with a small group of media educators, media producers, librarians and others in this effort towards building a “code of practice.” I look forward to following the progress of their work. When released, this statement of best practices should be an invaluable contribution to media literacy education in the digital age.

I’m excited the Center for Social Media just announced their upcoming event titled “Mind-Forged Manacles: The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy” on the first day of this project. The event at Washington College of Law will address many of the issues I’ll be exploring in this study, including

• “What do teachers know (and don’t know) about copyright?
• How does copyright confusion limit the quality of student learning?
• What are effective solutions to this problem?”

In addition, this course will explore the concept of “fairness” across a wide range of disciplines. The goal is to develop a framework for investigating the challenges facing educators and students in the digital age.

To learn more about this course, visit the description and wiki.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to watch this event live, but I look forward to seeing the archive online.