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

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.

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!

[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.

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?