For those of you in education who aren’t quite sure whether it’s OK for you to copy DVD snippets for use in your classroom, fear not. As of last year, the U.S. Copyright office holds colleges and universities exempt when the circumvention of DVD CSS protection is used to make compilations of movie segments for educational use in the classroom. These exemptions were effective as of November 27, 2006, and they will remain in effect through October 27, 2009.
Of course, the film industry didn’t offer up this exemption on their own accord. In fact, they argued against it, stating that professors could surely get what video footage they require from videotapes and DVDs without copy protections. For those of you who did not follow this story when it broke last year, I have provided a bit of play by play here for your review, courtesy of AP News write Anick Jesdanun:
“The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.
The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes — for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under “fair use” provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.
Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.
‘The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors,’ Billington wrote.” — Taken from U.S. Copyright Office Issues New Rights, by Anick Jesdanun. November 28, 2006
While that’s a bit of good news for my Intro to Humanities and Contemporary Humanities courses at PCC, what does this mean for elementary, middle, and high school classrooms? Well, I’m going to step out on a limb and apply the same reasoning to my own middle school classroom. This added freedom to copy and compile studio DVD material, coupled with the advent of rich media resources licensed under Creative Commons licensing, provides educators with a rich collection of material indeed! Though, there is at least one other item to consider.
How do we approach this issue when developing content for our online courses? I propose that, for walled courses via say, the Drupal or Moodle platforms, this fair use ruling for DVD material applies. However, I am not sure whether fair use covers course materials offered freely via “guest” status on these sites. I am not a lawyer and have no particular expertise with copyright legislation. However, this is what seems reasonable to me. I’m sure there are those of you who might be better suited to make this call, and I welcome any feedback you might provide.
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