Copyright Under COVID-19 in Film and Media Studies

Malaysian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (MJSSH)

Online distance education was once a process that was not easily been accepted by students, even by the educators, but when the pandemic strikes, they had to adopt and adapt the process in order to gain knowledge. The COVID-19 has resulted in shutting down schools, including tertiary institutions, all across the world. Consequently, education changed dramatically, and the mode of teaching was done remotely and on a digital platform. One of the adoptions of online learning involves using numerous online platforms and inserting interactive programs, music, animated graphics, photos in the teaching material to attract the interest of students. These types of works are, more often than not, copyrighted works that belong to someone. Generally, a license or permission must be sought before these works can be used by anyone. The permission or license, once granted, would involve a licensing fee or royalty payments to the copyright owner. However, this article looks at the law relating to t...

In November 2012, the educational provisions of the Copyright Modernization Act were proclaimed in force, thereby introducing a number of significant changes to the Canadian Copyright Act. These changes include the expansion of fair dealing to include the purpose of education, the addition of new educational exceptions for the online transmission of lessons and the use of work freely available through the internet, and a number of amendments that make existing educational exceptions more technologically accommodating. This paper considers the significance of these changes for post-secondary instructors, first contextualizing the changes in relation to recent fair dealing jurisprudence, and then considering their significance for everyday instructional practice. Drawing on influential court decisions and the commentary of academics and lawyers, the paper not only describes how the changes to the Copyright Act have expanded the rights and exceptions available to instructors, but also identifies a number of unresolved questions about how the changes should be applied in practice. Despite these areas of uncertainty, the paper concludes that the changes bode well for post-secondary instructors, as they relax many long-standing restrictions around the use of copyrighted works for educational purposes.

The abrupt shift of universities to an online environment has heightened the awareness and impact of the copyright law. The issue that the academe and faculty face is whether synchronous presentation of instructional material is in violation of the copyright laws and if a viable remedy or defense is available. Pre-Pandemic, educators teaching in the traditional in-class format used the Fair Use doctrine in deciding on using the copyrighted work to be presented in class whereas those in the online remote paradigm faced a different set of barriers. Congress enacted the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002 (TEACH Act) to overcome the barriers for those educators delivering courses in asynchronous mode using copyrighted instructional materials. The intent of the article is to discuss the premise and fundamentals of the Copyright Law, remedies, and defenses and whether the public policy exemptions afforded to faculty can be extended to the remote teaching synchronous environment created by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use; • Extensive adoption of "digital rights management" technology to lock up content; • Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary; • Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.

The fundamental goals of media literacy education-to cultivate critical thinking about media and its role in culture and society and to strengthen creative communication skillsare compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law, as interviews with dozens of teachers and makers of media literacy curriculum materials showed. In K-12, higher education, and after-school programs and workshops, teachers face conflicting information about their rights, and their students' rights, to quote copyrighted material. They also confront complex, restrictive copyright policies in their own institutions. As a result, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms. This is not only unfortunate but unnecessary, since copyright law permits a wide range of uses of copyrighted material without permission or payment. Educational exemptions sit within a far broader landscape of fair use. However, educators today have no shared understanding of what constitutes acceptable fair use practices. Media literacy educators can address this problem with the same techniques they use in their work: increasing shared knowledge. Like other creative communities, such as documentary filmmakers, media literacy educators from K-12 to university level can articulate their own shared understandings of appropriate fair use in a code of practice. This code can educate not only themselves and their colleagues, but their students and administrators. Finally, their code can guide and instruct other educators, in formal and informal settings, who use copyrighted material in their teaching for a wide range of educational purposes and goals.

Journal of Access Services, 2008

2009

The 1976 Act, now more than 30 years old, is the current law of the land with regard to copyright. The act gives remarkably broad protection to authors, requiring only that a creative work be fixed in a "tangible means of expression," such as a tape, disc, hard drive, or piece of paper. This means that copyright protection is sweeping, potentially covering artifacts as quotidian as e-mails, laundry lists, and love notes. Online, such activities as downloading a Web page for later reference or posting a video made while the television plays in the background, may constitute violations of copyright. Since the act was passed, the digital age has fundamentally reshaped the relationship between original works and their copies that held with the analog duplication processes of the former era (Exhibit 1). This transformation has created a host of legal, ethical, and social circumstances that the 1976 law could not anticipate. In this article, we explore how the technological, social, cultural, and legal developments of the digital age challenge educators and students who seek to make use of copyrighted material for educational purposes and offer educators strategies for dealing with today's copyright challenges. We conclude with a call to revise the copyright law and suggest the direction that a revised copyright law should take to support responsible, creative use of both traditional and new media content, both within and beyond the physical walls of the classroom. Copyright and Today's Students Digital transmission transforms the act of copying in two ways. First, digital technology enables mass copying; e-mail and Internet technologies allow users to send high-quality copies of graphical, visual, or musical materials to a huge number of recipients. Second, generation loss disappears (Nakano and Nakamura 1997); that is, each copy is precisely the same as any other copy. Indeed, if the work in question begins in the digital realm (as is the case with today's digital audio recorders, camcorders, and cameras), not only does every copy exactly resemble every other copy, but each copy is also precisely similar to the original. In this context, the essential difference between the original and a copy-the raison d'être for copyright law-becomes nothing more than a legal fiction. Educators struggle with these changes on the front lines as they are confronted with the task of educating young people about the boundaries of a copyright law that, when read conservatively, prohibits virtually all of the casual copying and remixing in which students often engage. According to Lenhart and Madden (2005), today's content creators are mostly young people who generate material for a wider Internet audience, branching outside of traditional educational venues to disseminate their content on personal Web sites, blogs, and various other kinds of sites, such as chat rooms and social networking sites. In doing this, they borrow

North Carolina Journal of Law and …, 2010

Copyright protection was meant to promote learning; yet copyright law too often thwarts this very purpose. Fair use is the primary means to restore the balance between the copyright regime's enablement of proprietary control and the public good of access. It is a right that must be exercised if it is not to be lost. This article demonstrates why fair use is so critical to higher education, and seeks to clarify legal ambiguities of the law offair use in order to better align this doctrine with critical educational goals. To illustrate the importance of the issue, we present data demonstrating the lack of equality in campus access to and use of information. For educational institutions with limited resources, fair use is of crucial importance, enabling faculty and students to access reasonable amounts of unlicensed content for scholarly and educational purposes. For individual scholars with limited access to copyright counsel or institutional subsidies for permissions and fees, fair use is also of crucial importance, enabling dissemination and publication of research. Unequal resources makes the lack of clarity and reluctance to use and defend fair use within the academy especially problematic. Fair use muscles may atrophy t The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not express institutional views or official university policy of our respective institutions.

Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 2014

Most of Canada’s publicly-funded educational institutions have operated since the 1990s under blanket reprographic licences. But recent Copyright Act amendments and Supreme Court decisions in several copyright cases have added legislative and judicial weight to the idea that copyright encompasses both private owners’ rights and public users’ rights in the form of infringement exceptions such as fair dealing. Many educational institutions have responded to these changes by moving toward greater reliance on statutory users’ rights and direct licensing with copyright owners, and by moving away from blanket collective licensing. Not unexpectedly, copyright owners and the societies and collectives that represent them see the changes in copyright law in a different light. Copyright owners’ and educators’ variant conceptions of the kinds of educational copying that are compensable pose a challenging policy problem in need of a principled solution that upholds the legislative underpinnings of copyright law and is perceived to be fair. This article attempts to frame a balanced understanding of underlying issues by considering the nature and purpose of copyright, the purpose of copyright collectives, what is meant by fair dealing, and, ultimately, how we should think about copyright. It suggests that meaningful change may not be achievable without concerted attention paid to the language we use to think and talk about copyright in order to construct a combat-free shared space in which learning, inquiry, and the production of creative works are fostered and, when appropriate, rewarded fairly.

Digital learning is being transformed by changes in copyright law. This article discusses the author's personal journey as a copyright education activist through two rounds of rulemaking proceedings before the Copyright Office concerning the anti-circumvention provisions of one part of the copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is the law that exempts YouTube and other ISPs from liability from copyright claims and criminalizes the circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) software that protects DVDs from being copied. Every three years, petitioners can claim their rights have been compromised by the current law; the Copyright Office pores over the petitions, weighs the pros and cons, and then offers recommendations to the Librarian of Congress, who ultimately grants or denies the exemptions. The author was successful in expanding the rights of K-12 teachers to legally " rip " DVDs by using the Section 1201 rulemaking process, which is one of the only significant ways that educators can expand their rights to use copyrighted material for teaching and learning purposes. By asserting the rights of K-12 educators to circumvent encryption to make fair use of copy-protected DVDs and online digital media for teaching and learning, the law begins to move beyond the needs of large-scale content owners to include the rights of educators and students.