Info/Law

I spent yesterday at a small workshop we organized to review a preliminary draft of the Berkman Center’s upcoming white paper, Obstacles to Educational Uses of Content in the Digital Age (see status report here). The premise of the project is that copyright law and accompanying business models and institutional practices prevent educators from taking advantage of digital media more than helping them do so. The paper seeks to identify some of those impediments.

It was a very stimulating event and a great group of people — scholars, lawyers, librarians, and educators (and some people who are all four of those things at once!). Among the several gazillion things we discussed:

• Why narrow and specific exceptions in copyright law (such as section 110) generally don’t help educators use digital media;
• The lack of consensus among educators on a responsible interpretation of the fair use doctrine and thinking about the marvelous statement of best practices for fair use recently developed by documentary fillmmakers as a possible model;
• The possible benefits of new technology to assist educators in clearing rights when necessary;
• Problems caused for educators by DRM (or TPM or access control technology or whatever you want to call it) that locks up content and prevents even fair use;
• Efforts to promote more open distribution models for academic content, including the prospect of universities urging (or even requiring) their faculty to make scholarly work more available.

We expect to release the white paper in July, and hope to have a public comment period on a later draft.

Filed under: Berkman, Education & Copyright, Scholarship