All entries for Wednesday 07 June 2006

June 07, 2006

Neat tricks for dealing with copyright?

Follow-up to E–learning Research: copyright and the principle of fair dealing in education from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Yesterday, the E-learning Advisor Team attended a training course at the British Universities Film and Video Council on copyright. The course was taught by Richard McCracken, Head of the Rights Department at the Open University, and his assistant Alma Hales. It was a very good course, and effectively covered the legislation and good practice with well thought-out examples. It also revealed some of the processes and techniques used by the OU.

Firstly a statement: I'm not a lawyer! This may be imperfect advice, so do not rely on it, make your own judgements.

Richard started the day by stating that, although he has lots of expertise in the field of IPR and copyright, he is not a lawyer. So the person responsible for managing rights in the UK's most content dependent university is just an ordinary person on an ordinary salary. This kind of work can be done without constant recourse to expensive lawyers. As the session proceeded, Alma and Richard demonstrated how they are constantly required to give advice as to what is acceptable. It seems that they have a good body of knowledge and experience upon which to safely proceed, getting legal support where necessary.

Alma then stepped through, in an effective way, the implications of UK copyright legislation. The details of what is not permitted were clarified. This was quite familiar to me, except for the details of two 'restricted acts':

  • providing means for making infringing copies;
  • authorising infringement.

I asked for more detail on these, raising a familiar example:

What if a university provided a web publishing facility to all of its staff and students, and one of them used it as a means for making infringing copies?

The response was that the university should have:

  1. a set of terms and conditions, agreed to by all members, that prohibit such acts;
  2. mechanisms for guiding users in understanding the legality of their acts;
  3. an effective complaints mechanism, and a swift "take down" policy, so that illegal content can be removed as soon as a complaint is received.

Warwick does well on points 1 and 3, which are relatively easy to do. All members must sign an agreement. We also have an effective complaints and take–down procedure (in Warwick Blogs there is a Report a Problem link, and in all systems content is easily attributable). However, the second point is much more difficult. We assume that users understand blatant copyright abuse, but it seems that they are poorly educated on the more complex issues such as breach of moral right.

What is meant by moral right? In British copyright law (not US), an 'author' (creator of the copyrighted material) has protection from instances in which their content is misused so as to misrepresent the content or the author. Artists often assert the moral right not to have their work misrepresented by being digitised, shrunk and presented on screen. Importantly for education, moral right over-ride any permitted acts, such as the use of an artwork in a review.

Permitted acts – using copyrighted material without permission

And so we first received the bad news: copyright is both strict and pervasive. Alma softened the blow by explaining some of the 'permitted acts' that allow us to use copyrighted material without necessarily having permission. It should be noted at this stage that:

  • the existence of permitted acts should not be used as an excuse to avoid having an effective copyright clearance process, as permitted acts are in fact quite rare, and always need to be thought about carefully.

As I have explained in the past, the most well known permitted act, the right to use content for private study or research, does not actually permit the use of copyrighted material in teaching or online. I'm surprised by just how often people who really should know better get this wrong.

There are some useful permitted acts. For example, we can copy an 'insubstantial' part of a copyrighted object. This is commonly taken to simply mean a specific percentage or a certain number of words. There are some accepted conventions, but unfortunately they are misleading. For example, if I were to reproduce online the most significant 400 words from a book of a thousand pages, I would be quite seriously in breach of copyright. If my act of copying damaged the commercial success of the book then things could get quite expensive for me.

A second permitted act is potentially much more useful. It may be possible to reproduce copyrighted material if that reproduction is for the purpose of criticism or review. This again is a matter of judegement. The copied material must be essential to the purpose, not incidental, although it is not necessarily the case that the review has to be about the copied material.

At this point the OU people made an interesting revalation. They use this type of permitted act to add some quite interesting content to their productions. They played an extract from a production that they made for the BBC. The production included scenes from a mainstream Hollywood movie. They did not have to pay a single cent for the rights to use the content. The OU production, however, was not a film studies programme, it was about science. They used an act of critically assessing a scientific gadget used in the movie to explain some scientific principles, thus making the science more interesting in true OU style.

I want to investigate just how far this permitted use can be taken. I suspect that much of what happens in the Arts Faculty is in fact criticism and review. The key is to make sure that the content is used in this way. For example, if a lecturer uploads a copyrighted image to a web site, but immediately makes a critical assessment of that image, is that then a permitted act? Also, it must not breach the moral rights of the author. I shall investigate.

In the second half of the course, Richard explained the copyright clearance process employed by the Open University. Content creators at the OU are expected to refer all possible uses of copyrighted material to the rights management team. The OU employs full time specialists to perform this role. Obviously the OU is content dependent, but as other universities become more digitally native, they should consider if they also require such an office. As Richard explained, there role goes beyond copyright clearance, they must help content authors prioritise. They suggest identifying early on which copyrighted material is most central to the content, so that more time and money can be spent upon obtaining clearance. The clearance process itself is greatly assisted by having full time experts who understand contracts and have many contacts within the business.

The BUFVC copyright course was extremely valuable. Apart from giving us a better understanding of what is not permitted, we came away with ideas that may allow us to use more copyrighted content.

During the session, we discussed the issue of deep linking. The OU people recommended that this is only done with the permission of the site owners. There is no legal reason for this, but some sites demand that links should go to their home pages. Today the History Department receieved an email from a US based image archive telling them not to deep link. There is no legal force behind this threat, however the archive could configure their servers to reject requests that result from following links on Warwick web pages.


Robert O'Toole : 07 Jun 2006 15:06 |  Tags:    |  Comments (8) |  Report a problem

What does it mean to be digitally native?

The term ‘digital native’ expresses a useful concept in clarifying the aims of learning technology development. It signifies both the technological and cultural challenges that we face. A specification of what it means to be ‘digitally native’ provides a clear cut measure for us to assess progress, and at the same time helps to explain why being digitally native is a good thing. Finally, it is a starting point for considering how we can create a digitally native university.

We do a lot of work on the assumption that the wider use of ‘e-learning’ or ‘learning technology’ is necessarily a good thing. This of course needs some explication and justification. Our founding claim is that learning, teaching and research (LTR) can be significantly enhanced with the application of appropriate digital and online technologies by staff and students for whom those technologies are self-evidently obvious and natural.

LTR activities are usually collaborative. The use of technologies within such collaborative activities requires that the various partners are comfortable and capable with the tools used. Each collaborator can be skilled to a varying extent, with some super-users leading the way. But experience shows that the more widely the skills are spread, the better the uptake of the technology, and the more effective it is in enhancing the activity.

The concept of ‘digitally native’ is useful. My conjecture is that the more people who are ‘digitally native’ the more effective the technologies can be in enhancing these collaborative activities. Steve Carpenter (Sciences E-learning Advisor) introduced me to the term ‘digital native’, and its antithesis ‘digital immigrant’. The terms, it seems, were invented by Marc Prensky (CEO of Games2Train and author of Digital Game-Based Learning). You can read more in his article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants in which he makes the more dramatic claim that there is a mismatch between digital native students and the digital immigrants who teach them. I’m not going to assess this claim. Rather, I want to give a more explicit definition of what it means to be digitally native, as a means to outline a vision of where I think the university should be in five years time.

What qualifies someone as being ‘digitally native’? A simple set of skills, employing the best available technologies. The digital native does the following:

  1. produce and store quality content (text, images, audio, video, diagrams, databases etc), with consideration of its presentation online;
  2. share content online, in an appropriate location and with appropriate security constraints (considering legal, moral and inter-personal issues);
  3. where responsible, maintain, update and remove content;
  4. structure the relations between content items;
  5. classify and describe content to make it more meaningful and useful;
  6. locate, assess and use shared content;
  7. edit and extend, comment upon, filter, and recommend to others;
  8. record and reflect upon their own work and that of others as represented by their online activities;
  9. create,define and manage networks of other online people;
  10. build up an electronic portfolio and profile;
  11. present samples of online work;
  12. reflect upon this work, in collaboration with others, so as to identify strengths, weaknesses, and actions for improvement (informally, or formally as peer review).

My assessment of the Arts Faculty at Warwick is that it is edging slowly towards being digitally native, but progress is slow, and in some areas non-existent. This pace is surprising, considering the technologies and services that are available. We have a reliable and increasingly extensive web architecture (Sitebuilder, Forums, Blogs), which is well supported and increasingly ubiquitous. There are also many isolated examples of successful technology enhancement of learning, teaching and research. But these remain isolated. Prensky would argue that the big blocker to a digitally native university is that the majority of the people who do the teaching and set examples to be followed are in fact digital immigrants.

My big question is therefore: what can I do to help more people in the Arts Faculty become more digitally native? – a big open question, but at least it gives me a very clear focus for my work. Our (Elab’s) response to this could be to just go ahead and create lots of online learning content for people, as some other universities have done. But that is certainly an un-scalable and un-sustainable approach. Rather, we create technologies and support people in using those technologies so that they become more digitally native. In answering the big question this approach provides a good starting point. But perhaps becoming digitally native is more difficult than we expect.
My first reflection on this is that our ELAT advisory process is successful because it works on an individual basis with people who tend towards the digital immigrant end of the continuum. We are therefore able to get to know their individual ‘technology comfort zone’, and edge them out of it in a sensitive and managed way.
And my second reflection: when I explain to people what i do, saying that I help staff and students become more digitally native is much more meaningful than saying that I am an e-learning advisor. It has other advantages in that it is easier for me to explain that I m enhancing their current uses of technology (which may just be pen and paper), and am giving them skills that are applicable in a wider range of contexts than just teaching.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Jun 2006 12:29 |  Tags:    |  Comments (7) |  Report a problem