Universities Mostly Misinformed on Copyright, Conference Told

From the audience, Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross said the industry has “no agenda to link or do ultimatums” on universities to force them to get rid of illegal downloading before becoming more flexible on other copyright issues or developing an easier way for universities to license content. Yet that’s the feeling on many campuses, said Paul Sweeting, editor, ContentAgenda.com. There’s been “nothing but tension between universities and copyright owners,” he said.

Universities symbolize outlaw downloading for many reasons, said University of Utah Professor Lee Hollaar. When Internet use started spreading, universities had faster connections than home networks, making illegal downloading on them “an attractive thing,” he said. But piracy trends show that “we need to divorce it from the university education function” and see schools as “a concentration of people,” he said. The content industry seems to want universities to eliminate piracy before it will agree on a better way to secure permissions for fair use of materials in classrooms and other legitimate educational settings, he said. Professors in particular are looking for “a fairly lightweight way of clearing things” and “and more reasonable way of enforcing the law,” he said. The great thing about the Internet is that “it actually becomes reasonable to talk about a system that can clear these things,” he said.

Students remain in the dark about true fair use, said University of Utah student Nathan Perry. In his film, journalism and music classes, “there’s not a whole lot discussed” about copyright, maybe because professors “didn’t feel it was their responsibility or officials didn’t get scared enough,” he said. In his film class, students would use copyrighted music and “it wasn’t something that was ever discussed” as wrong or illegal, he said. “We were OK with it,” because it would take too long to create original music or get permission, he said. That sends students a “subliminal message” that it’s OK to use whatever they want, said Warren Arbogast, president, Boulder Management Group. Many teachers flabbergasted by copyright law simply “close the door” to show a film clip or play a piece of music, he said.

“Teachers are working with very terrible copyright misinformation,” said American University professor Patricia Aufderheide. They're getting two kinds of information -- media reports suggesting that nothing is fair use any more and “coffee room” comments that “'it’s all fair use so don’t worry,'” she said. “Then people don’t want to learn the law because it might hurt them,” she said. Most “don’t understand the capacities of fair use in the classroom,” stifling students’ creativity, she said.

Most campus copyright advice comes from librarians, not legal experts, said Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters. “Most universities do not have attorneys who really know copyright and who are dedicated to knowing it,” she said. Universities need best practices for “when permission is needed, when an exemption applies, when in fact you're in fair use land,” while realizing that “there’s no magic test” for fair use and “that’s the blessing of it and that’s the evil of it,” Peters said.

Aufderheide and a research partner created a fair use FAQ for professors and others on American University’s Center for Social Media Web site. The idea is to inform content creators, and those teaching them, how legally to incorporate music, film clips and other works into their own. Arbogast said something as simple as “$75 lab fee” could cover costs for universities to secure a host of permissions for student use, he said. A unversitywide working group could gather to discuss how to get the industry to agree to “less costly performance rights… something that.. streamlines it,” he said. “We don’t want to keep mayhem going.” - Alexis Fabbri