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Legal Music Distribution for Education?
discstickers asks: "One of my classes next semester, 'Roots of Rock & Roll', has been canceled, because the professor isn't allowed to post the songs needed for the class, on a limited-access server ([which would] only be available to people registered for the class). So Slashdot, is there a legal way to get around this? The MP3s in question are old albums and individual songs. The cost shouldn't be too high, there are 100 people in the class with Macs and PCs, and we'd have to be able to burn the music to mix CDs for the final project."
how would this class have been taught in 1989 ? just do it that way.
Isn't allowed? Wouldn't this fall under fair use and education purposes, legally speaking? Haven't they been photocopying books and magazines for years under that clause?
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
You must buy a physical copy of each full CD that contains the song you want (since these are older songs, the singles are no longer available, so you'll have to just buy the whole thing). There must be a discrete copy of each CD/song/group of songs for each person in the class, including instructors and professors. So, figure 10 songs needed, 10 different full CDs to get the 1 song that you need, PER student.
Students will NOT bring tape recorders to class to record the lecture in order to avoid possibly recording a copywritten song and risking fines and jail time. The professor MAY make a mix CD containing just the songs needed for the class once he has obtained the needed number of copies of CDs (remember, one set of songs per listener), but he may make only one copy per student. These copies must be destroyed when the class is complete in order to reduce risks of accidental redistribution (FINES and JAIL. Your ass == MEAT). New sets of original CDs MUST BE PURCHASED for each new successive semester, and the above rules strongly adhered to.
Play nice, and we'll give you a 15% educational discount.
Thank you for respecting our intellectual property.
Love,
the RIAA
"50 years of profiting from the creations of others"
El riesgo vive siempre!
If all the students signed something to delete the copyrighted works in question after the class was over, it would be fair use, since the purpose would be educational and non-profit. It's the same as if someone showed a movie during class.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Hold the class in Canada.
Drawing on my legal education, I think there may be a solution: take a real class instead.
Is this a university rule? Clarification, please. It might be legal to post those files as you described as a fair use (thus making your question pointless) and it might be a school rule (also making your question kinda pointless because we don't know your school).
There is a law which explicitly dictates the terms under which you may use copyrighted material for educational use. Find it and do what it says, and it is legal.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Second, have the professor post a list of the songs that he will be teaching for the semester. Chances are, some students might already have some of the songs on CD or whatever, esp. if they're taking the class because they like rock and roll!
Third, have each student purchase the necessary songs from iTunes (with educational discount) for their own use.
Seriously, as long as it's under 100 songs, there's no problems here - some textbooks at uni are $200-400, depending on the subject area. Course materials that are around $100 are not unusual in fine arts classes.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I'm having a hard time understanding the difficulty. Libraries around the country can do it, why can't yours?
..the mean old Dean still won't let the prof enter the class in "Battle of the Bands". It's against school policy - and, besides, what hope does a ragtag bunch of school kids have of winning?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
1) choose songs only available on iTunes
2) post a list of the songs, plus instructions on how to buy them from iTunes
3) tell students it's their responsibility to get the songs, then don't push the issue any more
4) when the jackboots from RIAA come claiming Kopyright Infringement, tell them that you told the students to use a legal service, and it's not your problem they downloaded from kazaa, ripped and returned, or whatever
5) there is no step 5
It's JUST THAT EASY!
For every college course I took that required material other than my textbook, had a list that I had to take to the bookstore and buy. A typical lit class would require about 12-15 novels that I had to buy at the bookstore or at regular retail. Same applies here. Post a list of the songs that you need, your job to hit iTunes or buyMusic or your local used CD seller and purchase that music. Why should this be any different than it was with analog medium. If you don't the laws to treat digital media differently than analog, then why assume that you have/should have rights with digital media that you do not have with analog.
I reject your reality
.....The MP3s in question are old albums and individual songs. The cost shouldn't be too high, there are 100 people in the class with Macs and PCs.........
With the fast CD writers available today, this might do the job for you and might take less time than setting up the server, managing server security and authentication etc...
But then again, don't break any copyright law!
Unless there are a bunch of rarities in the playlist, chances are that $10 at a used record shop will net all the originals. (Not those hokey remastered-on-CD things.) Most college-age kids would learn a lot about music by going to such a store.
The TEACH Act is meant for situations just like yours. A bit of reading here or here should get you going. It is by no means a smooth path, for instance I cannot copy the laser discs we own, even to preserve them - let alone embed parts of them in power point presentations, like we want to do. One thing I do know is that copyright, as applies to schools is a gradient of gray, never black and neverwhite.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
If we're talking about the roots then most of the tracks should be over 50 years old - you could legally post them in Europe.
;-)
Of course if it's one of those fake courses that skips over the real roots and plays more modern stuff then that doesn't work. Then again would you want to learn anything from a course that glossed over the real history?
Fair Use does not apply if the copyright holder is financially damaged by the event (the education/nonprofit nature of the copying activity is but one of the required tests). Ironically, the advent of legal per-song online music sales makes single-song distribution damaging to copyright holders -- students should buy the songs needed instead. Now if the professor made small excerpts of the relevant songs (for written materials the permissible excerpting is usually about 10-20%) then it might be OK. But a complete song would definitely take a customer away from the copyright holder.
As with all things legal, there are no hard and fast rules, just fuzzy guidelines. It all boils down to what the copyright holder can prove to a judge.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
People who do not know their rights, do not really have them.
From Subject Matter and Scope of Copyright page 24
Nonetheless we live in a society of copyright extremists. Plese mention the Eldred Act in your political contributions to make copyrights lapse after 50 years unless re-registered with a $1 fee per year. You know, write it on the memo section of your $20 check. Also joining the EFF helps. Thanks.
The campus radio station should broadcast the
songs at a specific time -- the copyright holders
would get a small compensation.
Then the professor should ask the students to each
tape that broadcast for personal use, which they are
legally allowed to do.
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
but it doesn't quite give them the flexibility they'd need to digitally mix and rmx the songs on a computer. FM mp3/ogg/acc CD. I like it though, cause its a nifty hack to get around the damn licensing problems. You could even plug a UBS/Firewire FM tuner into your boxen and avoid the extra step w/tapes
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
da denk i wurkli
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
The prof should give you a cd list along with a copy of the reading list for the course. I doubt they are giving books away at your uni, why should they give away other pieces for the class.
I would also question the value of having an entire piece available to students. What's the point. Do you really need to listen to various pieces of black music of the 40's to know that's where Elvis and Buddy Holly stole their playing style?
Since this is obviously a 'frippery', useless class, why doesn't the prof examine modern music with freely downloadable crap off the internet? I'm sure those garage and indie bands would be happy to 'license' the music for that purpose.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You should use free software like QuickTime Streaming Server. The students can listen to the files via streaming, but they cannot copy them. This should satisfy even the most paranoid university administrators.
QTSS, or its variant Darwin Streaming Server, runs on MacOS X, Windoze, RedHat, BSD, and probably others. Files can be received with the free QuickTime player on Mac and PCs, and if you use formats like MP3, are probably acceptable on any OS you could find. The new version of QTSS has improved administrative features for setting up audio playlists.
Find minor bands that illustrate the needed points who either post music free to the internet or sell music on the the internet or through small recording companies.
Unlike the big names a school can easily negotiate with such groups and most of them will be delighted to help other people appreciate music and become musicians - because they've not forgotten what music is about..
The professor should find a rock-n-roll anthology series of CDs with the music and have the campus book stores offer it for sale. Then have the library have them available for listening or checkout. Or maybe get a couple of local bands to do covers of the songs and distribute them. You would have to worry about ASCAP/BMI fees, but this might be a cheaper route.
What, me worry?
I'm setting something like this up at the school where I work. We've got a 2500+ CD 'Jazz Library' and instead of loaning CDs out to students we're digitizing all the content. We intend to make records in the library's card catalog which is accessible to all students via a web browser, the virtual cards will have 'rtsp:' URLs pointing to the streaming server. We've checked with a few labels and a lawyer and they all say it's alright as long as the students can't actually make straight copies of the data, which they can't with the QuickTime Streaming Server.
The big problem is getting all the departments to do their job, we need the Jazz department to front up all the labor and data for digitizing in a format that works with our streaming server and make records that the Library department's server can use. We also need the library department to actually integrate the records and attach the URLs that IT gives them from the streaming server. Not to mention the issue of who pays for the streaming server upgrades (OS X 10.3 unlimited server and huge hard disk space upgrades). We don't have an official 'project manager' on the payroll, so there's nobody with the job of coordinating who has to do what and how everything must be done.
Right now we have a G4 running iTunes (5 concurrent user limit) streaming to the dorms, and it's buying us time with the Jazz department.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
What if one of "the needed points" is that attributes A, B, and C of the music and attributes D and E of the performance are correlated with how high a record climbed on the charts? In such a case, "minor bands that illustrate the needed points" don't exist because if "minor bands ... illustrate[d] the needed points", they wouldn't be "minor" anymore.
If we're talking about the roots then most of the tracks should be over 50 years old - you could legally post them in Europe.
But if it's being taught in the United States, then it doesn't really matter where the songs are posted in; it matters where the songs are posted from, that is, the laws of the soil where a human being controls the compilation. This would be the United States, where copyrights on sound recordings last effectively forever. Because of a technicality in the U.S. copyright law, new classes of works are copyrighted from the moment that the class is recognized, and for sound recordings, this is 1972. Add 95 years plus the end of the Gregorian calendar year, and sound recording copyrights don't expire until 2067, that is, after most professors teaching today have died.
Now many classes require students to read books. What, the lecturers don't give out copies of the books for free? You have to <gasp> pay for them yourself? What is the world coming to?
Couldn't you just use iTunes. At $.99 a download the school might pay for the professor to download them and then he could burn them onto a CD and distribute those to the class. CD-Rs usually cost about $1 a piece, less if you buy a bigger package. So this could all be done for less than $200 if I'm not mistaken. If you have 100 people everyone could pay $5 and that would more than cover the downloads, the CDs, and leave some extra for other expenses. Just a thought.
If that was the case Classical music could not be thought.
If they are studying only the musical aspects (that is why they need the recordings) then any band that can play the music to a proficient enough level (most can, they are musicians after all) would be able to convey a close enough experience.
In Classical music this is common day to day practice, whay it should not be the case with Rock and Roll?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If they are studying only the musical aspects
Are you sure that this is in fact the case? In my mind, the study of rock music is unlike the study of classical music in that the study of rock music tends to encompass the study of a particular chart-topping recording as much as the study of the music itself.
Why not do the same thing for music coursework? Everyone would be required to buy the 50 songs listed for the course. At 99 cents each, that's about the same price as a book.
Alternatively, the professor could legally post 30-second samples of each song. Though not optimal, s/he could at least pick sections of each song (say key chords, or hook lines) that portrayed why it was important to the history of Rock and Roll.
Give serendipity a chance.
Taking a similar class at my school, what is the problem with using a textbook, that contains a CD (legally done by the publisher) of selected works? In my music appreciation class, our literature for the class included 4 CDs (or 4 tapes for that matter). And if you purchase the book, you purchase the CDs that come along with it.
YOU'RE WINNER !
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