“The Digital Learning Challenge”
I am delighted to report that the Berkman Center has released the white paper on which I have been working, along with Professor Terry Fisher and a terrific team of Berkman fellows and Harvard Law students, for the last year. The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age explores the ways in which copyright-related restrictions impede innovative educational uses of digital content. The full paper is available in a navigable HTML web page here or as a PDF download through SSRN here. The research and writing, including two workshops involving a cross-section of experts, were funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
I’ll have more to say later; for now I’ll just quote from the abstract:
Drawing on research, interviews, two participatory workshops with experts in the field, and the lessons drawn from four detailed case studies, the white paper identifies four obstacles as particularly serious ones:
- 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 white paper concludes with some discussion of paths toward reform that might improve the situation, including certain types of legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution.
The case studies, in particular, help illuminate a set of problems that deserve far more attention.
Filed under: Berkman, Copyright, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Internet & Society, Open Access, Scholarship
New Berkman WP: Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material…
Bill McGeveran sez , “I am delighted to report that the Berkman Center has released the white paper on which I have been working, along with Professor Terry Fisher and a terrific team of Berkman fellows and Harvard Law students, for the last year….
[...] I was so excited Friday when BoingBoing gave a great write-up and link to the new Digital Learning white paper. Obviously, if you are trying ot make your work visible to the technie world, that’s one of the best places to be. It was also a vivid personal demonstration of the well-known reach of that site, because I got e-mail from random friends sending virtual back-slaps over the mention. [...]
[...] One of the interesting hard questions in the recent Digital Learning white paper was the tension between making it easier to get licenses for content on the one hand and promoting a robust understanding of fair use on the other hand. [...]
[...] One of the great things about the release of the Digital Learning white paper has been the comments that are coming in from diverse readers who heard about it from someplace online. Case in point: Mike Duigou, who e-mailed me to say that the problems we reported sounded familiar to him from a different context: “the implications of copyright policy and DRM with regard to alternative media (braille, audio records, electronic editions, etc.) and disability.” He continues (quoting with permission): Copyright, fair use and DRM have very important implications for the disabled and there are a number of ongoing actions and policy initiatives which are probably worth investigating. In particular your comments regarding “Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.” could be extended to include anyone responsible for providing alternative media. [...]
[...] The Berkman Center’s increasingly terrific new media production team has rolled together this special-edition podcast on copyright in the context of teaching and learning. It’s an extension of the work done on the Digital Learning Challenge, led by Prof. Terry Fisher (the first voice you hear on the podcast) and former Berkman fellow, now Prof. William McGeveran, and funded by the Mellon Foundation. The theme of uncertainty in the digital copyright realm is particularly real in the context of using works in teaching and research, despite all manner of reasons why we wouldn’t want that to be so. [...]