UCLA Profs Banned From Posting Course Videos

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "As of Winter Quarter 2010, UCLA professors will no longer be able to post videos on their course websites. Although they've long relied upon fair use protections for educational use, the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab. Even though they believe their use of the materials to be fair, the UCLA has decided to back down rather than face litigation. Many professors have commented that this will hurt students, because they now have to watch all videos at the IML, which isn't open on weekends, forcing students to try to fit assigned videos between classes."

Comments

Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[eldavojohn]

Although they've long relied upon fair use protections for educational use, the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab.

That may be the case now but according to the article, that was the specific problem. That they were using Video Furnace to post videos online so students could view the videos outside of the IML which has horrible hours like being closed on weekends. From one of the students:

"If we want students to write a paper on the film over the weekend, it’s more convenient for the student to rewatch the movie online over the weekend. (The ban) makes teaching cinema more difficult (because) Video Furnace was extremely useful," Gans said. "I very much hope (the university) will reach some kind of agreement."

It seems they licensed Video Furnace for use of its technology only on campus and only on campus machines. But the ease of use means that if you post a Video Furnace movie on your course website then students -- or maybe even anyone -- could access it using a browser from anywhere. The summary link says that this may work but is not recommended due to possible latency from the server.

The ACLU backed down because, well, the university is probably violating its licensing agreement with Video Furnace. The professors don't do licensing so they didn't understand that what they were doing was wrong. The solution is to threaten to leave Video Furnace unless they amend their licensing contract or give you a way to convert to an open format that the professors can post where ever they want -- once you have the raw video, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. It's been shown that free online courses don't hurt enrollment anyway.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Anonymous Coward]

Video Furnace and HaiVision merged in March 2009 to form HaiVision Network Video. Please continue to the HaiVision site for all Video Furnace related

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[reg106]

The summary is *very* confusing. In fact, TFA is very confusing. From the first few paragraphs, it is easy to misinterpret the videos in question to be recordings of lectures, but that is not the case. After reading the whole article, it is clear that the courses under consideration require students to view movies, produced by some external content-provider, outside of the class. They watch the *whole* movie, not just a part, so educational use alone isn't enough to trigger fair use. (Otherwise we'd all just use photocopied textbooks)

When you buy a DVD, it has an implicit license to the conditions under which you can watch it (That FBI warning at the beginning indicating you can't show it to a large audience). To comply with copyright law, an "instructional" DVD which permits showing to an audience is required. I am only aware of this because our design course shows the Nightline "Deep Dive" video. If you look at the educational version (checkbox), it allows you to show to a group, but NOT to stream it. In order to stream the content, a difference license for the video would be required. I'm not sure how to get such a license right now, and this will be inconvenient for a few semesters worth of Bruins, but as demand for streamed instruction content grows, I'm sure viable licensing options will arise (as we have seen for music and popular video content).

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Z00L00K]

And then - people are surprised that the quality of education is getting worse.

The copyright and patent issues seems to put a blanket over everything, so soon is the western world going down the drain while countries where copyright and patents are weak will outpace the western world.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Richard_at_work]

The solution is to threaten to leave Video Furnace unless they amend their licensing contract or give you a way to convert to an open format that the professors can post where ever they want -- once you have the raw video, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo.

Surely the 'solution' would be for the customer, in this case the ACLU, to buy the correct licensing - not threaten the license holder...

Your suggestion smacks of 'wahhh I didnt buy what I should have but give it to me anyway!'

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[networkBoy]

Fair use still applies to the whole movie:

US Code Title17, Chapter1, ss107 is crystal clear:

the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

-nB

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[pavon]

When you buy a DVD, it has an implicit license to the conditions under which you can watch it (That FBI warning at the beginning indicating you can't show it to a large audience). To comply with copyright law, an "instructional" DVD which permits showing to an audience is required.

This is false. There is an explicit exemption for use of videos in the classroom. From 17 USC 110 (1):

(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;

However, this does not cover posting videos online, like UCLA was doing. IIRC (can't find a link right now), there have been cases where schools tried to include videos in distance learning classes, and the judge ruled that it was not fair use.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[quetwo]

The VideoFurnace product they are using allows users to stream the video using Multicast, using their VOD (Video On Demand) module. In theory, this content can be viewed anywhere on the UCLA Multicast Domain, which also includes a majority of the Internet2. Generally this is seen as "on campus only" Consumers cannot watch this content from home, as most commericial ISPs don't participate in Internet2, nor do they support multicast. Additionally, the VideoFurance equipment allows for this content to be encrypted, which disallows users to simply copy the content.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[reg106]

US Code Title17, Chapter1, ss107 also says:

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

IANAL, and I am unclear on the full implications of the case law surrounding this, but clearly the interpretation cannot be so broad as you suggest. Otherwise it would be useless to copyright educational materials. Educational purpose is one aspect to be be considered, but (3) is also a significant consideration here. If you showed clips of a movie in a cinema class for the purposes of analysis and criticism, that would be fair use. To show the whole movie, you need an appropriately licensed version. Similarly, since the 90s universities (and students) have been paying royalties on papers included in course packs, even though these papers are clearly for educational purposes.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[sribe]

...crystal clear:

Yes, it's pretty clear. It's your reading comprehension that's lacking. "The fair use... for such purposes as... is not an infringement..." does not mean that "any use... for such purposes... is fair use and therefore... is not an infringement..." The other requirements for fair use still apply even for such purposes.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[interkin3tic]

The ACLU backed down because, well, the university is probably violating its licensing agreement with Video Furnace

Frankly, I don't know why the american civil liberties union was sticking their nose into the University of California at Los Angeles' business anyway. I'm guessing they got the acronyms mixed up, which must have been very embarrassing for them at court.

"Your honor, the ACLU feels it's use of video in online courses not only is a fair use, but also we don't even offer courses, nor do we put videos up for said nonexistent courses, so we ask you to dismiss the case."

"Uh, this was a case against UCLA, not the ACLU"

"... We knew that. Just wanted to point out we're not using video. I'll show myself out."

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[PopeRatzo]

Fair use still applies to the whole movie:

Of course it does.

But when you have the money and will to sue anyone whose fair use you don't like, you get to make the rules and the law be damned.

And now that industry groups like AIME and RIAA can dump millions into swaying elections with impunity, they probably won't even have to go to the trouble of taking anyone to court, because even the smallest copyright "infringements" will become criminalized rather than a civil matter.

That's their holy grail: to make all intellectual "property" "infringement" a felony, no matter how small, and to wipe out once and for all the notion of "fair use".

Watch for public libraries to start closing then. My guess is they'll open up low cost, privatized "ebook libraries" where the the ebooks will self-destruct via DRM after a short time. They'll say this approach is "better than libraries". The privatization of the public library system is coming to America. Bet on it.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[cpt kangarooski]

However, this does not cover posting videos online, like UCLA was doing.

That would be 110(2), but it has a number of limitations to it, such that UCLA might not have qualified for it, depending on precisely what it had been doing.

And of course, where no other exception applies, and where the use would otherwise be infringing, fair use may always be raised as a defense. It might not succeed, as not every use is necessarily a fair use, but it might succeed, as any use is potentially a fair use.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Anonymous Coward]

The professors don't do licensing so they didn't understand that what they were doing was wrong.

You're confusing things. You should have said:
The professors don't understand licensing, so they didn't understand that what they were doing violated license agreements.
and separately:
The professors didn't understand what they were doing was wrong, because they weren't doing anything wrong.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Anonymous Coward]

from what i've seen, uni's get such a deep discount on software that i doubt their loss of business is much of a threat.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[networkBoy]

True, but given that this is EDU and likely won;t impact market as clause 4 indicates means that it should apply as fair use (IANAL either), textbooks on the other hand would have clause 4 severly impacted, thus fair use would not apply.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Dorkmunder]

That is not what the experts in education policy are saying. Here is a good link for info and discussions about what is appropriate, whether through Fair Use or the TEACH Act http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2010/01/27/can-we-stream-digital-video/

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Mr. Slippery]

The ACLU backed down because...

Did I miss something? How is the ACLU involved in this?

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[commodoresloat]

Well it's not that it "would not apply," but that the balance would likely be determined against fair use. The tricky thing about fair use is that all four of those criteria must be considered, but there is no indication of how to quantify their implications. A lot of university lawyers try to get out of this by saying arbitrarily that 10% (or whatever) of a copyrighted work is all that may be used, but that is just a number pulled out of the air. In general violations of this sort are likely to be treated on a case by case basis by the courts, and gray area cases can be pretty unpredictable.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Anonymous Coward]

That's their holy grail: to make all intellectual "property" "infringement" a felony, no matter how small, and to wipe out once and for all the notion of "fair use".

At which point it becomes clear to everyone that to play by the rules is to be a sucker. Currently there are people who won't use bittorrent to download movies or other copyrighted material because they think it's wrong. But their numbers will dwindle if corporations become more and more dickish.

Personally I think that copyright was a good idea in its original form and with fair use considerations, but the extensions and restrictions have essentially broken the original deal. Now the moral thing it to consider the source of material -- support artists where possible, screw corporations.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[reg106]

I still believe a fair use argument would be on shaky ground, but as someone else pointed out below, Fair Use is not the most relevant section of copyright law in this instance. Sec110 - Exemption of certain performances or displays applies more directly. Certainly (1) seems to permit showing a full video so long as the instructor is present in the classroom and the video is directly relevant to the class. (I am now confused. We were advised to buy the "educational group licensed" version by the university, but I am not sure what further benefit this license provides, and I can't find one of the licenses right now to be more concrete.).

Regarding the issues at UCLA, Sec110, (2) covers transmitting a work (as also pointed out below). The exemption in (2) applies to:

the performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or reasonable and limited portions of any other work, or display of a work in an amount comparable to that which is typically displayed in the course of a live classroom session, by or in the course of a transmission, if.... [more conditions]...

Since a movie does not seem to be a nondramatic literary or musical work, the movie would fall under "any other work," so a "reasonable and limited [portion]" of the work may be performed if the subsequent conditions are also met. For the UCLA case, that seems to imply that you are limited to using a part of the work. The alternatives would be to show it live with an instructor present (but the faculty don't want to waste class time or schedule TAs for group showing) or to provide copies for individuals to check out (but the hours of the media center are inconvenient). (Hmmm, the educational license I mentioned may have allowed a group to watch for educational purposes without an instructor present, e.g. a group showing in a library media center). In any case, it seems that the problem can be solved by working out a different licensing agreement.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Anonymous Coward]

The Video Furnace recordings are ONLY available on campus (not from the general internet), as you can see from the link included. But yes, these are (for example) foreign films and whatnot, rather than class lecture recordings.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[Trepidity]

It shouldn't even need fair use, given that the State of California and its universities enjoy sovereign immunity from copyright and patent suits. I'm not quite sure why they capitulated in light of that.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[PopeRatzo]

Currently there are people who won't use bittorrent to download movies or other copyrighted material because they think it's wrong.

I'll have to go ahead and ask you to provide a citation to back up that statement.

Certainly there are people who don't know how to use bittorrent or download movies or other copyrighted material. And there are people who just don't want the hassle. And there are people who like to have the liner notes and nice plastic cover that comes with a CD or DVD. There are certainly many who fear the long arm of the law causing them to lose their homes or jobs or reputation, or who fear having to pay a huge fine if the RIAA or MPAA or AIME come after them.

But "believe it is wrong"? I have my doubts, but I'll allow for the possibility.

Re:Summary Is Confusing or Erroneous

[rastoboy29]

I misread that, too.  It was not the ACLU that backed down, but UCLA.

So they are still spineless and undedicated to the ideas that they should be championing in our society.

Fair Use

[conureman]

Time to get a new edition of the Legal Dictionary, the one with the correct interpretations of words you THOUGHT you knew, like Common Law, and Common Sense.

Re:Fair Use

[IBBoard]

Common Law, and Common Sense

Aren't those two basically a dichotomy when it comes to copyright law and the like?

Granted, there may have been other issues involved here (e.g. licensing) but the issue that is presented seems reasonable enough for it to be silly to threaten the profs/university.

Law School Opportunity?

[HTMLSpinnr]

What a better way to break in some law or pre-law students than to represent this case. Backing down benefits nobody but AIME and future precedent for online coursework.

Re:Law School Opportunity?

[JNSL]

Except that allowing or enabling licensing violations is bad precedent. Surely they backed down because they realized they had no case. After all, they needed licensing in the first place. If this were to qualify as fair use, so too would that.

Excellent, two thumbs up!

[moz25]

Isn't this *exactly* what we want? Let the next generation get first-hand generation of the worse sides of copyright law. THEY are the ones who will tip the balance to actually change things as the older generation is phased out.

I hope they will remember this incident very well in their future careers.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[bsDaemon]

I'm reminded of a quote by the great libertarian socialist (anarchist) thinker Mikhail Bakunin which goes "To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion." I think that you might be too hopeful if you think that kids are going to get a bum idea of copyright law then take to the streets to change it. I would hope that institutes of education would take a stand against such an inequity, but apparently this is what happens when school start to be run as businesses rather than as institutes of learning.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[MozeeToby]

Not by taking to the streets, by taking to the boardrooms (and courtrooms and congress chambers). In 20 years, the generation that grew up loathing the copyright moguls will be the ones making the decisions, and I'd be willing to bet that they'll make their decisions a little differently than the groups that are in charge now.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[jo42]

Not when they get a taste of the almighty Dollar (or Euro). They will then be turned to the dark side...

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[couchslug]

"To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion."

Leaders matter and masses are literally stupid cattle to be manipulated for good of ill by their betters. If some of those students become leaders, we may see change.

"I would hope that institutes of education would take a stand against such an inequity, but apparently this is what happens when school start to be run as businesses rather than as institutes of learning."

'Start??" Education IS a business, to train people to function in a world of business so they can trade for food, clothing, and shelter.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[bsDaemon]

Schooling and education aren't the same thing, but maybe I just have a different perspective on things -- my academic degree is in English and Classical History. I work a system administrator, but I'm not really an "IT person" in the traditional sense. As the head of the Classics department at my school used to say, "a liberal arts education prepares you to fully enjoy the life you'll never be able to afford." Before I finally bit the bullet and got back into computers ( do have a valid nerd background -- a 5-digit id and I'm only 25 and a half), it was pretty true.

But, when I was in school studied literature, history, philosophy, politics, sociology, etc. I traveled abroad and made friends with foreign students who came to my school to study. I was always reading on my own, debating, etc. Do I use anything in my schooling for my job? No, not really -- but I use what I was educated with every day, because it gives me a very different perspective on things than I would have gotten if I just plugged into a terminal for the whole time I was at college. I was the English major who used unix and who occasionally wrote perl scripts to help with structuralist analysis of literature.

Of course, this is all off-topic now, but its just that the idea that an education is supposed to turn one into a good little worker bee really gets under my skin.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[Mister Whirly]

Yeah, just like all the hippies in the late 60s who grew up to be the conservative corporate suits now. I am not holding my breath. The almighty dollar can really do some damage to morals and ideals over 20 years of time.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[mcgrew]

In 20 years, the generation that grew up loathing the copyright moguls will be the ones making the decisions, and I'd be willing to bet that they'll make their decisions a little differently than the groups that are in charge now.

You'd lose that bet. Back in the seventies we were a new generation with new ideas. The old sexual taboos were gone, nobody called a loose woman a "slut" because they all were as "slutty" as we men, marijuana was going to be legal as soon as the dinasaurs were out of power.

Then came AIDS and free love went out the window. My generation is now in power, and guess what? Those in power are the same kinds of assholes that were in power when my dad was younger than I am now, and I no longer see pot being legal "any day now".

It's not a generational war, it's a class war, and you and I are on the losing side.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[khallow]

"To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion."

Why should there be? It'd almost be like expecting most people to have a particular mental illness (with the implication that the mental illness is a good thing). The masses have been burned every time that they entertained revolutionary ideas, hopes, and passions of the sort promoted by Mr. Bakunin and his ilk.

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[couchslug]

"...an education is supposed to turn one into a good little worker bee..."

That's exactly what PUBLIC education is for. Private education is for whoever pays the bills to determine.

If the customer/student wants a particular curriculum, they can choose freely among the offerings in the market (or self-educate if the market doesn't suit).

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[quanticle]

Really? Why don't we look at the previous generation? The same boomers that participated in Woodstock ended up voting for Reagan and Bush. So you can't expect that sort of attitude to remain

Re:Excellent, two thumbs up!

[hazem]

The same boomers that participated in Woodstock ended up voting for Reagan and Bush.

Not necessarily. The number of people at Woodstock is in the thousands while the number of boomers is in the millions. There were plenty of people at the time who thought the people going to Woodstock were a bunch of "damn dirty hippies", and plenty more that had never even heard of it until well after the fact.

It could be an interesting thing to research but I suspect that the people who voted in Reagan and Bush were, for the most part, not the same people who attended Woodstock.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

[Rogerborg]

by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

What a curious definition of "promote" we've arrived at.

To clarify:

[Anonymous Coward]

They are NOT talking about videos of the courses

The ban applies to videos assigned by professors for students to watch.

Previously these could be streamed and watched at student's leisure. Now they have to go to the media lab to watch them.

Re:To clarify:

[ArundelCastle]

Now they have to go to the media lab to watch them.

If the demand on the media lab increases to the point where students need to use it on weekends, the university should extend the hours of the lab if it has any sense.
They're deliberately trying to save court fees... will they also say they can't pay a few students minimum wage to sit at a reference desk on Sunday?

So negotiate a license with the copyright holders

[JSBiff]

This seems like just a 'simple' negotiating situation to me. UCLA should just refuse to buy or use any instructional videos which don't grant them a license to make the videos available to enrolled students and faculty online. If the copyright holders want to play hardball, play hardball. Heck, extend this beyond UCLA, and make it a State of California mandate for all state Universities in the California system. What instructional video publisher wants to be locked out of all California public Universities?

Videos? In college?

[Hatta]

What sort of videos are we talking about? The only videos I've ever watched in an educational setting were pointless time wasters intended to give the teacher a break. If that's what we're talking about, they have a point. But there's really no loss as they're a waste of time anyway.

If we're talking about video recording of lectures given by professors, then the professors should have the copyright and should be able to distribute them any way they want. This would be far more useful than some generic educational video anyway.

Remote Access?

[VoiceInTheDesert]

Couldnt this be solved by simply allowing some sort of remote, vpn-type thing so that only students can access the videos (but the videos/vieo files still physically remain on campus)? Files don't have to be "online" to be remotely accessible and it seems to be the internet part that the copyright people object to.

Re:Remote Access?

[innocent_white_lamb]

Apparently that's what they've got with this Video Furnace thing. And that's what the copyright holders are objecting to.

Re:Actually *attend* the lectures?

[VoiceInTheDesert]

This is about supplimental learning from what I understand. Not lecture material, but educational videos that relate to the topic made by someone other than the prof and for which there is not time in class to view.

Strange wording in summary

[Anonymous Coward]

(1) "the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab." (2) "Even though they believe their use of the materials to be fair, the UCLA has decided to back down rather than face litigation. Many professors have commented that this will hurt students, because they now have to watch all videos at the IML,"

In sentence 1, the fact that videos are available to watch in the IML is used as an argument that this is fair use. It is implied strongly (without it, the sentence makes no sense) that videos are ONLY available to view in the IML. However, in sentence 2 it is asserted that restricting viewing to the IML would be a change from today and more limiting.

Effectively translated: 'VIAA claims that this is not fair use, because videos can be viewed from anywhere. But we refute this, because videos can be viewed from anywhere including the IML!'

Re:Actually *attend* the lectures?

[XxtraLarGe]

When I was at university, we had to go to the lectures in person - not wait for them to come out on video. How times change.

I'm sure these aren't the lectures, or else there wouldn't be an intellectual property issue. Then there's the issue of online classes. I work in distance education, and have to put a lot of video in classes, because students don't attend a lecture. We embed them in our course management system (Moodle), so they're only accessible to our students, not just out in the wild.

$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck? There are Americans out there who are willing to pay $40,000 a semester just to watch some goddamn "educational" videos? Is this for real?

Back when I was in college, I wasn't paying anywhere near that much, but you'd better fucking imagine that I got my money's worth by dealing with the professors and making sure they were teaching me directly, and not just telling me to watch some cockbiting "supplementary videos" or any fancy shit-in-my-pants like that. Fuck.

How is this different from course readers?

[nweaver]

Written material by others, namely, course readers, have to abide to copyright: there is no fair-use exemption that allows the readers to be made without paying the copyright holders, nor for faculty to copy textbooks.

Why should videos not done by the faculty be any different?

Re:How is this different from course readers?

[mcgrew]

Had you read some comments before willy-nilly posting, you would know that there is, in fact, fair-use exemption that allows the readers to be made without paying the copyright holders, and for faculty to copy textbooks.

Re:Actually *attend* the lectures?

[justinlee37]

I have a job at my university operating a remote-control set of cameras to record professors teaching their classes. We then upload the videos online for students to watch. Times do change.

Use Textbooks

[Anonymous Coward]

As a side effect, just get back to traditional teaching methods and start using text books($$). Also big large buildings and pass the cost to students in name of increase in tution cost.

Re:Use Textbooks

[CarlDenny]

Teaching film classes from textbooks is like masturbating to ASCII porn.

digital libraries

[uiberto]

Since these videos are for educational purposes for students of the university, it seems simple enough to restrict access based on student IDs. Perhaps there is a method to check out online media from the library.

This article (being that it's on UCLA's site) mostly seems like a ploy to gain popular support even though they violated their contract with Video Furnace (who respects copyright law). "We can't provide this free service anymore because of the big bad company we just scammed!" I could not envision a similar article complaining about Coca-Cola refusing to stock vending machines that were being robbed routinely.

Digital libraries are going to face a whole slew of copyright issues over the next century. I imagine this concept of intellectual property will become more and more absurd. If there are any modern librarians out there, I'd love to hear what challenges you face.

Of course by the year 2110, copyright will struggle to adapt to telepathy, but it will be in vain, as no one can stop me from watching Free Willy with my mind. I like the part with the whale.

Not nearly as bad as the summary sounds

[RingDev]

This isn't about a recording of a lecture that gets posted, this is about copyright protected videos that a professor shows during a lecture being posted.

So under this threat, a professor that shows "Steamboat Willy" in a class can not post "Steamboat Willy" onto the more accessible distribution system.

-Rick

Re:Not nearly as bad as the summary sounds

[StuartHankins]

Mod parent +1 Insightful, succinct.

Re:Not nearly as bad as the summary sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

You write that as if your clarification does not still sound completely batshit insane.
Do you think that just *maybe* going to still try to download these movies for study? They'd better hope that their professors assign more recent movies; if they have to study Blade Runner, they're probably fine, but if they're trying to find a torrent of Battleship Potemkin, they'll probably be SOL.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[BarryJacobsen]

by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

What a curious definition of "promote" we've arrived at.

It's actually pro-mote. As in "in favor of dust". As in the progress of science and useful arts should collect dust if it's not making some business (read: MY business) money.

I'm not sure to understand

[werfu]

The AIME is saying the teachers posting video online of their lecture are infringin copyright laws. But aren't the teachers owner of their lecture copyright?

Open IML on the weekends

[ktappe]

If the profs feel that strongly, then they need to vociferously make it clear to the administration that no action comes without a consequence. Specifically, demand the IML be open on weekends. UCLA probably instituted the ban to save money on legal fees and/or licensing but now need to be made to pay to open the IML at hours the students can use it. TANSTAAFL.

Re:Open IML on the weekends

[John Little John]

Exactly. If they don't want to fight this legally, then open the damn lab up. It is UCLA for the love of Christ. It's one of the largest universities in the nation. It can't staff the media lab on weekends?

Re:Open IML on the weekends

[Anonymous Coward]

There is simply no money at UCLA to keep the IML open on weekends. For the first quarter of this year, the entire undergraduate library was closed on weekends and very early (about 10pm) during the week. In previous years the library was kept open 24 hours. The library has mostly resumed its old hours, staying open Sunday through Friday 24 hours and closed Saturday, but only because we received a huge donation from an anonymous donor. Unless we can convince that donor to pony up some more cash, the IML will remain closed on the weekends. The hours of the IML have recently been shortened during the week as well, so it now closes at 5pm.

Re:Open IML on the weekends

[winwar]

"There is simply no money at UCLA to keep the IML open on weekends."

I find that hard to believe. The same for the lack of money for library hours. This is a University. If students can't access materials for learning at useful times then what is the point. I can understand closing during low use periods but early evening and weekends!?!

There are plenty of places they can cut back and free up funds. I'm sure they could reduce staff, reduce programs and reduce faculty and reduce salaries. Heck, they could even raise tuition. What they lack is the will to do so. The library and labs (and students) are just easy targets.

"The UCLA"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's as good as Bear Grylls "In The Moab"...

RTFA

[Sloppy]

The summary almost makes it sound like professors can't put up videos of their own lectures. But that's not what this is about at all. It's about professors not being able to put up other people's video. It even mentions a cinema professor. e.g. "Hey, we're gonna watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tonight and talk about it tomorrow. Oh, you can't come tonight? No problem, I'll just put the movie up on the class website." It's not exactly shocking that someone objected to that.

Re:RTFA

[SoTerrified]

"Hey, we're gonna watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tonight and talk about it tomorrow. Oh, you can't come tonight? No problem, I'll just put the movie up on the class website." It's not exactly shocking that someone objected to that.

WAITAMINUTE.

Copyright was created to protect the rights and ownership of the author and insure they were compensated for their work for a limited time in return for the work becoming publicly available to enrich the community later. However, there are exceptions. Specifically...
"In the United States, the fair use doctrine, permits copying and distribution without permission of the copyright holder or payment to same. Fair dealing uses are research and study; review and critique; parody and satire; news reportage and the giving of professional advice (i.e. legal advice)."

Which use of this material by this class DOES NOT fall into research, study, review or critique? The method the information is transmitted is utterly irrelevant. On what basis could you object?

Re:RTFA

[Sloppy]

Fair dealing uses are research and study; review and critique .. Which use of this material by this class DOES NOT fall into research, study, review or critique?

Their objection is going to be that the material is copied for the purpose of someone researching/critiquing, rather than as research/critique. (I'm trying to think of a way to say that, without sounding subtle or pedantic, but I'm not doing well.) The copy of the movie that they're distributing, doesn't have the fair use qualifiers in it.

Suppose we were talking about textbooks. Obviously all of those are for study. But if it were legal for schools to print "pirate" copies of those for their students, don't you think Addison-Wesley would have lobbied (successfully) to change fair use law by now?

The critiquing would come in when you quote the textbook and make fun of how it says that 2+2=5. The same would go for videos. The critiquing would come in as you show the helpless female victim of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre transforming into a battle-fever-fueled chainsaw-wielding berserker at the very end of the movie, and then contrast it to mid-movie transformation of cooler-headed protogonist of I Spit On Your Grave, and then go on to discuss whether or not Ripley in Alien was really that much ahead of her time. ;-) But if you just show the The Texas Chainsaw massacre in its entirety, you're not really doing that; it's not really a quotation, even if you've marked it up so that a dumb computer parser says that it is. Tobe Hooper's lawyers are going to come a-calling and seriously, they'll win.

Similar as with copyrights on scientific papers

[blind biker]

The copyrights are NOT owned by the authors (the researchers, who did the experiments, compiled the results, came up with theories, ideas, formulas and supporting material, wrote the whole damn thing), but by the journal. Who gets all the revenue, too. The researchers get jack. And their work, since copyrighted, cannot be distributed to the humanity as a whole, even though that was the intention of the scientists.

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Kleiba]

You have a college education?

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is wrong with you.

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[wjousts]

What the fuck? There are Americans out there who are willing to pay $40,000 a semester just to watch some goddamn "educational" videos? Is this for real?

Back when I was in college, I wasn't paying anywhere near that much, but you'd better fucking imagine that I got my money's worth by dealing with the professors and making sure they were teaching me directly, and not just telling me to watch some cockbiting "supplementary videos" or any fancy shit-in-my-pants like that. Fuck.

Kinda hard to teach film without, you know, watching films.

Kinda like teaching literature without reading books.

Their mission statement....

[goffster]

"The mission of AIME (pronounced “aim”) is to promote fair and appropriate use of the media and equipment delivering information in a rapidly changing world."

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Colonel Korn]

What the fuck? There are Americans out there who are willing to pay $40,000 a semester just to watch some goddamn "educational" videos? Is this for real?

Back when I was in college, I wasn't paying anywhere near that much, but you'd better fucking imagine that I got my money's worth by dealing with the professors and making sure they were teaching me directly, and not just telling me to watch some cockbiting "supplementary videos" or any fancy shit-in-my-pants like that. Fuck.

UCLA tuition is more like $5000/semester.

Re:Who owns the copyright?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA!

Re:Who owns the copyright?

[ABasketOfPups]

They don't own the copyright to the movies, which is what was being posted, not their lectures. Check out the rest of the comments where the incredibly poor lead-in is taken to task.

Watch it .. Copy it .. Enjoy ..

[lorg]

Something tells me that a UCLA student knows how to make a duplicate of a video ...

1. Go to lab.
2. Make copy of video to watch whenever you want. If you can watch it, you can copy it.
(3. profit? oh wait that would be wrong and illegal ... unless knowledge is its own reward or perhaps knowing to much is illegal to)

Slightly more work then just straight to home streaming but a minor hickup in the grand scheme of things.

college executives are notorious wimps

[peter303]

For giving way to small amounts of pressure.

'standards' based solution?

[hAckz0r]

Why on earth did they opt for Video Furnace in the first place, which is an on demand hardware based live media solution? Yup, that's like having your own on-demand cable-tv setup where you control the video stream, or deny access until subscriptions and/or per-use payments are all in order. An open standards web based solution would do them just fine, only it would allow the less technically challenged people the capability of making a private copy for later reference (i.e. like taking notes). The current configuration requires custom client side 'player' software which is apparently where the copyright violations come into play. The media lab has licensing for the player software but you average Joe on the Internet does not. The Media Lab should look at several options:

1) Control access to the site via user ID and password and licence the client software accordingly. This is not my option, as this still denies students access that don't have the required OS platform.

2) Switch to an open standard for streaming or downloadable media which does not require any special player so that _all_ OS's and browsers can be used. There are many open solutions that won't cost the University a dime to deploy. All they need is software to create a media content web server, which they already must have in order to do what they are doing now.

Re:'standards' based solution?

[cdrguru]

An open standards web based solution would do them just fine, only it would allow the less technically challenged people the capability of making a private copy for later reference.

Sure, and it therefore allows redistribution - why should the rest of the world not benefit from UCLA's movie collection? BitTorrent, anyone?

The problem is, the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up to the "pirate manifesto" which says (a) digital goods have no cost and (b) if it exists, I want a copy. When it does, great. Until then, you can expect lawsuits over distribution and redistribution where someone isn't getting paid.

Re:'standards' based solution?

[hAckz0r]

lawsuits over distribution and redistribution where someone isn't getting paid

The issue here was the software needed to use/deliver the media, not the media itself. The only pirating going on was the students using a proprietary software package that they were told they needed to have/install on their personal machine in order to use the media that they already paid for through their tuition fees. Their tuition fees did not however pay for the software they needed, and the University should have known that. The company producing the software has a right to demand licensing fees from the University for the use/distribution of that software, but as for the students, they just want the content that they already paid for. Using an open standard for distribution should make all three parties happy, legally speaking. Nobody needs to pirate anything here, and that's the point.

Re:Who owns the copyright?

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

Why would they not have the copyright to the movies of their classes? Is Video furnace a movie production company that comes in and videos the classes (av staff) or just some software used to create the movies?

Re:Who owns the copyright?

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I did read the article and it did not make sense to me. Maybe because I am unfamiliar with Video Furnace or whatever that is and how it works. The article never said who owned the copyright, who was threatening to sue. The group that notified the University seemed to be like RIAA for teachers, the Association for the Information Media and Equipment, can not be the copyrighter certainly, it is a non-profit membership organization offering copyright information and support to teachers, librarians, media center directors, producers and distributors of informational film, video, interactive technologies, computer software and equipment. So they are the RIAA in this case not the copyright owner. We know its not the teachers, they were trying to post their course. It's not UCLA they backed down, its not the media center. No where in the article does it say who owns the copyright, no where.

I did RTFA, and thank you for asking. BTW RTFA before making such a claim about my claim that that was not information given in the article.

My confusion comes too from the fact that I taught for 27 years and did some video classroom work.

In my day...

[jbarr]

I just don't get it. OK, so I went to college in the pre-Internet days, and times have obviously changed, but this really struck me:

"Many professors have commented that this will hurt students, because they now have to watch all videos at the IML, which isn't open on weekends, forcing students to try to fit assigned videos between classes."

Isn't part of the educational process (or life in general) getting people to be responsible with and accountable to their time? Or am I just part of an older generation?

How is "forcing students to fit assigned videos between classes" any different from "forcing students to read assigned books between classes" or "forcing students to fit research time between classes"?

Re:In my day...

[agnosticnixie]

College libraries are pretty much always opened weekends and early evenings; around exam time, many universities keep them opened all the way to midnight. This is a rather major difference from something that's only opened during class hours.

Re:So negotiate a license with the copyright holde

[Mikkeles]

Yes, because Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama is a perfect substitute for Citizen Kane.

Re:Videos? In college?

[tristanreid]

I took a lit class called "An Introduction to Vice" in which we read a bunch of Shakespeare plays (Othello==Rage, Merchant of Venice==Greed, etc) and watched 12 Hitchcock films. The films were an integral part of the course.

In high school and before, I can (sadly) see your point. But if you have a prof. showing a film in college and you consider it a pointless time waster, I think you went to the wrong school or took the wrong class.

-t.

Re:Videos? In college?

[pavon]

If you RTFA, you would see that they mention several examples. This is not about lectures. Some of them are educational videos, which I tend to agree are often a waste of time. However, some of the videos are absolutely necessary for the course (in some form or another), like this one:

Eric Gans, a French cinema professor, has also been impacted by the video ban. Because his class falls on Mondays and Wednesdays, Mondays are usually designated to watch the movies that they discuss on Wednesdays. However, two weeks this quarter, due to the national holidays that fall on Mondays, Gans’ 40 students will have to individually watch the one copy of the movie held at reserve in the Media Lab.

“If we want students to write a paper on the film over the weekend, it’s more convenient for the student to rewatch the movie online over the weekend. (The ban) makes teaching cinema more difficult (because) Video Furnace was extremely useful,” Gans said. “I very much hope (the university) will reach some kind of agreement.”

I imagine that buying a dozen imported french films would be fairly expensive for a student, so it would be nice if they could come to some sort of arrangement that is better than a single reserve copy.

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Anonymous Coward]

UCLA does not operate semester schedules but quarters. Otherwise, yes, tuition is not cheap but nothing compared to private universities. As usual room and board are the big expenses. Having roommates and a well-paying summer job helps alot. It gets you experience and connections for post-university life too!

Re:Videos? In college?

[Hatta]

No, I didn't watch any videos in college, just HS. Which is why I expressed surprise at that. Generally though, I'd consider English Lit to be a pretty pointless waste of time, videos or not.

Re:So negotiate a license with the copyright holde

[JSBiff]

I'm no negotiations expert, but my understanding is negotiations work because bothsides have a stake and in fact want the negotiations to succeed. Sure, UCLA and the UC System wouldn't want to lose access to the video works. But, neither would the copyright holders want to risk losing the revenue they get from the UC system. But, if the California powers that be (I'm not sure what it's called in California; in Ohio we have the Ohio Board of Regents, and ultimately, the governor and legislature) threatened or even passed such a resolution, it would be an interesting game of chicken. *grin*

In any case, my ultimate point is that this isn't an issue of 'fair use' or an issue, really, of inadequate copyright law - it's an issue which can and should just be negotiated. The UC System and the State of California are big enough that if they just manned up, they could get whatever they need from the copyright holders.

Re:So negotiate a license with the copyright holde

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like just a 'simple' negotiating situation to me. UCLA should just refuse to buy or use any instructional videos which don't grant them a license to make the videos available to enrolled students and faculty online. If the copyright holders want to play hardball, play hardball. Heck, extend this beyond UCLA, and make it a State of California mandate for all state Universities in the California system. What instructional video publisher wants to be locked out of all California public Universities?

I fully agree with playing hardball.

I say take it a few steps further. Comply with their request for 6 months. This will give UCLA an exact dollar value of damages caused by this illegal threat for a baseless case.

Then go to court, this time not as a defendant but as the litigant. Fair use exemptions are clearly in force here so this is a frivolous lawsuit made in bad faith (Giving oneself a title of 'copyright holder' requires you to be aware of the laws related to such a title. As far as I am concerned, not doing so is negligence, and any damage caused by their negligence is made in 'bad faith')

UCLA really should also look into a government exemption to copyright restrictions, seeing as most of their money comes in the form of federal grants. It should only be a paperwork issue for the video purchases to show as coming from the US Department of Education (a federal agency except from copyright restrictions) instead of coming from UCLA.
Any federal government office is automatically except and is legally unable to violate copyright (At least the copyright of American made works. I assume it might not apply to other countries, but also assume we will respect those countries laws about as much as we do now, aka not much at all.)

Imagine books instead of video

[Cajun Hell]

Teacher: "Good morning, lit class. Next we'll be reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It's for sale at the bookstore. Go buy a copy and read the first 100 pages and we'll talk about it on Monday."

Student: "Buy?! I can't afford that."

Teacher: "Ok, well the library also has--"

Student: "Only one copy and Ralph here next to me already checked it out."

Teacher: "Ok, well, then, I'll just take my copy here over to the photocopy machine. Who all of you need a free copy?"

Student: "Me!"

Student: "Mee!"

Student: "Me too!"

Heller: "Brains!" [Kills teacher and eats brain.]

Student: "Why did you kill teacher?"

Heller: "Copyright infringement."

Student: "You're dead. Why do you care?"

Heller: "Need money buy brains."

That's a totally believable scenario. But change the book to a movie and suddenly people are surprised that someone's brain got eaten.

Re:Imagine books instead of video

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things:
1) I had a professor whose favorite text book went out of print, so he did *exactly* that. We still had to pay for the printing, though.
2) If the copy machine were, in fact, free, you couldn't stop people from doing this. Sounds kind of like infinitely reproducible digital media, right?

Re:Imagine books instead of video

[Cajun Hell]

If the copy machine were, in fact, free, you couldn't stop people from doing this.

You usually wouldn't be able to stop 'em because you'd never know when it's happening. But whenever you catch 'em, eat their brain and they'll stop. (They caught UCLA and UCLA stopped, didn't they?)

Clarification of the issue.

[managerialslime]

What sort of videos are we talking about? The only videos I've ever watched in an educational setting were pointless time wasters intended to give the teacher a break. If that's what we're talking about, they have a point. But there's really no loss as they're a waste of time anyway.
If we're talking about video recording of lectures given by professors, then the professors should have the copyright and should be able to distribute them any way they want. This would be far more useful than some generic educational video anyway.

Your understanding of the problem is close, but imprecise.

What is at stake here are professors whose lectures routinely use copyrighted materials.

One prior post speculated that the resulting video should be legal due to the "fair use" doctrine.

Another prior post speculated that due to a technicality, that lecture reproduction is fair use for an educational DVD, but specifically not legal (i.e. infringing) when used with streaming video.

As a result, rather than figure out which lectures are infringing and which are legal, the school has just banned everything to be safe.

Re:Who owns the copyright?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they not have the copyright to the movies of their classes?

Nowhere does TFA article say anything about movies of their classes, only about movies for their classes.

In other words, these are not videos of classroom lectures or any other UCLA-produced works. They are educational films and international cinema.

Re:Videos? In college?

[tristanreid]

I'd have to disagree with you on that one. If you've never read something that moved you, you haven't read the right books.

-t.

torrent?

[commodoresloat]

link please?

Re:torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go: Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama

California has gone to pot

[tepples]

I no longer see pot being legal "any day now".

Months ago, President Obama announced a policy revision not to interfere with states that legalize medical cannabis. One might compare this to the 21st Amendment, which devolved the power to ban alcohol from the federal government to the states. I wait to see how this will apply if California voters put pot over the counter this November.

Re:Who owns the copyright?

[Anonymous Coward]

No where in your testimony does it seem like you taught for 27 years.

Re:Actually *attend* the lectures?

[mcgrew]

When I was at university you could smoke cigarettes in class, and smoke pot with the professors after class.

How times change!

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Marful]

So... how exactly do you learn about using a trolley to do a trucking shot, while doing still photography?

How exactly do you learn about what makes a good scene break / transition, while doing still photography?

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[JNSL]

"Promote" in the sense you want to use it is shortsighted. Copyright promotes science and art by incentivizing authors to create/author works by providing economic reason to justify competing. If you imagine, 'how can we do the most with what we got' as some kind of promotion, you're losing sight of how to get there in the first place, and how to incentivize people to share too.

They're not showing them to everyone...

[Xenographic]

> No problem, I'll just put the movie up on the class website." It's not exactly shocking that someone objected to that.

Actually, it's still pretty unreasonable, because the videos on the class website are only available on campus and not (easily) saved (unless you have a stream ripper for media furnace or something). That link is in the submission, but it seems like people are busy pointing out that the videos in question are commercial videos that are class assignments (rather than videos of lectures) while ignoring the fact that they're not just distributing these videos to all and sundry. They're only letting students watch them.

Textbook publishers want you to buy THEIR content!

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this is a ploy by Pearson Education, Wiley and McGraw to encourage/force/coerce students and professors to use their approval course materials and restrict profs to only uploading anodyne word files and pdfs.

It's really insane because the big publishers love to freeload on free media and boast of the amazing amount of "video" content in their products - when it's really old stuff or just YouTube. Disgusting.

Re:So negotiate a license with the copyright holde

[JNSL]

This will give UCLA an exact dollar value of damages caused by this illegal threat for a baseless case.

This is not an illegal threat. UCLA acknowledges that the would-be-plaintiff has a valid copyright because they entered into a licensing agreement with them. If they violate the license, not only is there a state claim for violating a contract, but a federal claim for violating the copyright. There would be no failure to state a claim, especially for a frivolous suit. Intellectual property is very, very special and viewed as unique. Accordingly, the bar for frivolity is just that much higher.

Fair use exemptions are clearly in force here so this is a frivolous lawsuit made in bad faith

No matter what you think, it is not clear. Fair use is almost never clear. It is also not bad faith, for the same reasons I outlined above.

(Giving oneself a title of 'copyright holder' requires you to be aware of the laws related to such a title. As far as I am concerned, not doing so is negligence, and any damage caused by their negligence is made in 'bad faith')

No it doesn't. Federal law grants you copyright when you fix a creative work to a medium. You can call yourself whatever the heck you want - it doesn't matter, and you don't have to know anything about your rights. Not that I should have to tell anybody this, but requiring you know something about your rights to have your rights is counter to the very concept of what it means to have a right as opposed to an advantage.

Any federal government office is automatically except and is legally unable to violate copyright (At least the copyright of American made works.)

This is very misleading. Sovereign immunity, while it has recently applied to the Lanham Act (trademarks and unfair competition) and federal patent statutes, has not been tested against copyright (at least to my knowledge). Not that it matters. At worst this means that you cannot sue the State of California or a federal agency for violating your valid copyright. However, you can still sue an employee of either, and obtain an injunction to get them to stop using your intellectual property. When one of these employees/officials acts in violation of a valid federal statute - like anything under Title 17 - that official is by definition acting outside the scope of their employment, which is all sovereign immunity will protect.

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you do a trucking shot using a trucking camera you truckwit. Truck me, I'm outta here.

Entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the USA. Nobody should ever get anything ever without somebody else making a (maximum) profit on it. Anything else would be socialism! Besides, now those students will have time to pray and go to church while waiting for their turn at the pay-per-view media center. I'll bet the only students who needed easy access to those videos were illegal immigrants anyway. Send 'em back home I say!

the Chronicle of Higher Education

[q2a]

Well, on 2/2 the Chronicle lit this power-keg;

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/University-Pulls-Videos-From/21013/

UCLA had been using "Video Furnace" to provide video content in the context of courses (integrated with UCLA Moodle as well), and has recently suspended this based on a challenge from AIME. The article gives a little more background.

IANAL but I am a Graduate student at UCLA and anytime a company wants "protection" money for something my PUBLIC University already paid for AND am using under fair-use laws, I scream Soprano.

Paying for protection?? Isn't that mob turf?
Oh well..

Re:Videos? In college?

[Hatta]

I've read plenty of stuff that moves me. It's just all non-fiction. It's really pretty hard to get worked up about stuff that never happened to people that never existed. Shakespeare just seems like 400 year old soap operas to me.

Just about the only fiction I care for is Lewis Carrol and Edgar Allen Poe. But still, studying those in college would be a waste of time when I could be learning valuable skills instead. It's entertainment.

The thing I really hate about english lit is that you have to interpret it. IMO, the purpose of writing is communication. If your meaning isn't clear and unambiguous, you have failed as an author. If you have something to say, come out and say it and don't hide it behind layers of symbolism.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[martin-boundary]

Copyright promotes science and art by incentivizing authors to create/author works by providing economic reason to justify competing.

Don't bring the Invisible Hand into it. It's been discredited. Give a real reason that actually works.

Mod parent up!

[reg106]

The link provides a very even-handed discussion of the issues involved.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[JNSL]

This is the legal definition of promote. Copyright, in the US, is an economic matter. Period.

That said, the invisible hand has little to do with what I said. If the market for creative works were able to self-regulate, there would be no copyright. Copyright is a market correction.

Common Law is mostly irrelevant

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Common law is mostly irrelevant to copyright. Copyright is almost entirely statutory. (i.e. passed by the legislature rather than judge-made law that derives from centuries of doctrine in England). While there are some old cases (there was one between the AP and another news aggregator that was effectively a "scraper" of AP-published news content during WW1), for the most part the copyright law says whatever Disney pays your Congressman to make it say.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[martin-boundary]

It still has to do with the invisible hand, though:

1) Give authors economic rights.
2) ??? <-- invisible hand
3) Science and the useful Arts progress forward.

I don't dispute that this cargo-cult mechanism is included in the US constitution, but you have to admit that Rogerborg is right to at least question it.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[JNSL]

But copyright is a market correction, used because the market for IP fails to produce what we want. It's disingenuous to cite an economic theory based on market self-regulation in support of explicit recognition of a market's failure to regulate.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[martin-boundary]

Touché! Point to you.

Oh fuck them....

[dogzdik]

This fucking copyright nazi-ism is just getting out of fucking hand..... Oh OH OH OH OH ...... I told my friend what I recalled about a story I read in a newspaper.... Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh NOOOOOOOOO Copyright infringment. Fuck off............

can you see the little piggies...

[twoHats]

oink oink squeel...

Re:Videos? In college?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go pat yourself in the back, you special snowflake.
It's college, not trade school.

A Shame That UCLA Won't Contest This

[ArizonaJer]

I find it a shame that UCLA won't contest this attack on fair use, because the fair-use defense desperately needs some clarification in the context of copyrighted video being used in an educational context.

For cinema professors, it's essential that they be able to provide their primary texts (i.e., films) to students. Over the past 15-20 years, it's become clear that it is fair use for cinema educators to use film stills in PowerPoint slide shows, course Web sites, and textbooks. See, for example, Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art. Initially, however, copyright holders objected to this use of stills, wrongly claimed that it was not fair use, and demanded payment. Despite this resistance, fair-use of stills has become standard practice.

Unfortunately, there is no similar standard for fair use of moving images. And, because UCLA is not using fair use to defend the posting of (copyrighted) video in a password-protected online system open only to students, an important opportunity to set precedent has been lost.

The result will be chilling. If freakin' UCLA cannot defend the fair-use posting of videos, then what chance does the average state university or small private college have?

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Khyber]

"So... how exactly do you learn about using a trolley to do a trucking shot, while doing still photography?"

Oh, I dunno, you learn about film speed, shutter speed, and how it applies to a moving subject in an actual photography class, since it all applies to movies in the basics and in the long run? Still photography shoots can be non-stationary (follow a distance runner in-focus while moving at their speed, and take a high-speed shot to capture their movement in absolute clarity.)

"How exactly do you learn about what makes a good scene break / transition, while doing still photography?"

Oh, I dunno, maybe by observing the multiple transitional shots done for still photography exposes in history, and watching traditional film-splicing techniques and film-overlapping/frame blending techniques? Understanding how time-lapse photography is turned into movies? How to capture the sun's sun's analemma?

Are you that ignorant?

Re:$40,000 a semester to watch videos? What the fu

[Khyber]

I have a nice 35mm SLR that can capture most anything, including the Milky Way. Considering the capabilities of my camera, I could probably get your shot and THEN SOME.

Minolta X-700 w/ ISO200 high-grain film FOR THE WIN.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[Rogerborg]

Mmm hmm. As we all know, before copy rights, nobody ever said, sang or wrote anything down for fear that their work would simply be stolen from them without recompense. It's a miracle that we ever developed fire without a robust system of intellectual property.

Re:To promote the Progress of Science and useful A

[JNSL]

Except that back then there was no need to worry about copying because it was too difficult to do. Once the printing press was developed, we had to worry about it. The first thing like a copyright statute was in 1709.

That aside, it's not that some people need motivation, but that copyright is intended to optimize the situation.