Fair use? In schools, forget it.
p2pnet news Kids & Kartels | Freedom:- Schools in North America, Asia, Europe and everywhere else in the world are being flooded with deceitful, deceiving, delusive, delusory, disingenuous ‘educational’ materials produced by the entertainment cartels, with the software houses on their heels, to ‘instruct’ our children on intellectual property law.
What? IP law? For kids? Yes.
And even worse, it’s happening with the full support and cooperation of teaching staffs and administrations, backed by their local governments. These are the people who are supposed to be looking after our children and making sure they’re exposed to high standards of honesty and correct values
But this intensive invasion of schools, and the corporate mind-rape of our kids by self-interested corporate concerns, has been going on for years and no one, least of all parents and teachers, seems overly concerned.
The idea is, get ‘em while they’re young and their minds are easily imprintable and in the process, the concept of fair use is deliberately being trampled underfoot.
George Abell’s high school students analyze persuasion techniques used in advertising. But they don’t analyze real ads—Abell is too afraid he might run afoul of copyright restrictions. Instead, he spends time in the summer creating dummy ads for them to analyze. They’re not as good, as interesting, or as persuasive. But he’s confident he’s within the school’s guidelines.
Cheryl Jenkowski-Knowles’s students create and analyze art by inserting themselves into portraits from European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painters. The original project, suggested by a student, was to use album-cover art, but Jenkowski-Knowles wants to stay clear of any question of using copyrighted materials.
In Kwame Nelson’s social studies classes, students make mashups that draw from popular music and the latest political news, as audiovisual op-eds about current affairs. But they don’t show them on the school’s closed-circuit TV system. It might be a copyright violation.
These three hypothetical examples appear in a new publication from the Center for Social Media.
Called The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy, it makes the point that concept of fair use is being ignored in US schools.
Says the executive summary:
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 skills—are 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. (My emphasis.)
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.
Below are clips from the paper:
Until the current era, many teachers often simply relied on fair use – whether or not they knew they were doing that – in the classroom. A few still do, and the Media Education Foundation as a matter of policy employs fair use in its media literacy videos. But many teachers and producers of media literacy materials now worry that they will misinterpret fair use or are simply unaware of its expansive nature.
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Fair use is the most important tool in copyright for educators. It is a venerable doctrine, first devised by federal judges more than 150 years ago, and explicitly incorporated into Sec. 107 of the Copyright Act in 1976. It is intended to balance the rights of users with the rights of owners, by encouraging the widespread and flexible use of cultural products.
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More than any other feature of copyright law, fair use recognizes the core speech values enshrined in the First Amendment. In effect, the doctrine creates a kind of situational public domain. The Copyright Act, rather than specifying acceptable uses, sets forth a number of considerations that courts and other decision makers should take into account in deciding whether, on balance, a particular unlicensed use of copyrighted material should be permitted rather than forbidden. Today, courts’ analyses of fair use issues tend to center on one question: Whether the use in question is ‘transformative,’ in the sense that it adds value to the copyrighted material and employs it for a purpose different from that for which it originally was intended. Transformativeness can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both.
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Educational fair use is at the heart of U.S. copyright doctrine. Too often, however, fair use guidelines are taken as exhausting the universe of possibilities, rather than describing a small bunker on a much larger landscape. In particular, the CCUMC guidelines enjoy credibility to which they are not entitled. Today, more than ever, educators need to know about the full range of reasonable fair uses available to them and their students.
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The majority of interviewees could not provide an accurate working definition of fair use. In their thinking, it often was confused with other issues. For instance, when asked about fair use, another teacher explained, ‘I emphasize that students must cite all sources.’ ‘It’s a very vague definition,’ said another. Few interviewees reported receiving any formal information sessions on copyright and fair use. Strikingly, no interviewee reported receiving any education or training about fair use.
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Then see this:
One teacher was told by the technology specialist in her school that her students’ media projects could not make any use of copyrighted clips if the program was to appear on the local cable access station in their community. In another case, a professor has undergraduate students work with public school children to produce short documentaries related to their schools. However, the professor will only post them to her Web site if students make absolutely no use of copyrighted work.
Even communication within the school community is thwarted by restrictive perceptions of copyright. One interviewee’s students videotape in the hallways, where other students inevitably ‘ham it up.’ Students then edit together this footage over all different kinds of popular music, in order to explore how the music changes the meaning of the images, for a project called ‘Ham Cam.’ ‘But we don’t broadcast these things over the air or even in our school intranet,’ he said. ‘I think it might be illegal to broadcast popular music – even over the closed circuit school network.’
Many of the media literacy educators we interviewed discourage students from creating works that incorporate film and video excerpts, especially for works created for festivals or competitions. ‘Students can’t use copyrighted music – or video – for work intended for competition,’ one teacher explained. Few student media productions submitted to festivals include a focus on critical analysis of popular culture – the core learning focus of media literacy.
Misinformation perpetuated. Teachers communicate their own copyright misinformation to the next generation.
Few media literacy teachers in our study included a focus on copyright and fair use in their teaching—although some expressed a wish to do so. Most say that they themselves ‘don’t know enough’ to teach about the topic. Only one teacher in our study described how he explores the issue of copyright and fair use, using multiple perspectives on the issue and ‘not spoon-feeding students what they should think about it.’ In a context which introduces the history of copyright, media concentration/ownership, and ethical decision making, his students have active dialogue about copyright and form their own opinions about it.
Others communicate ad-hoc, groundless rules of thumb – and then let students ignore them. For instance, one teacher lets her middle-school students get their material from the Internet but does not let them use any clips from DVD movies in their video productions. Her general rule for copyrighted materials is: ‘If you have to pay to use or see it, you shouldn’t use it.’ However, she acknowledges the real limitations of this approach, stating, ‘If you told them not to use any copyrighted material, they wouldn’t have anything to work with.’
Copyright holders are even using the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as their foil, and kids around the world are the targets, as I say here, going on:
Aimed at nine to 14-year olds, it’s bulky 72-page book filled, as Ars Technica points out, with ‘colorful examples’ of copyright law in action.
‘The most surprising thing about the booklet’ is that it, ‘devotes eight pages to coverage of the public domain and other limitations on copyright,’ says the post, going on:
The booklet is called ‘Learn from the Past, Create the Future’ and is designed to be used in school classrooms. It’s only available in English at the moment, but Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish versions are all coming. The book is peppered with amusing (*cough*) games for kids to play, including ‘Clear the Rights,’ ‘Public Domain Detective,’ and ‘Spot the Infringement.’
Fair use? Forget it.
Meanwhile, as I say here, “if you and your teachers love and care about our children … take back control of what happens to them, what they’re taught and by whom. If you don’t, the corporations, of which Hollywood is only the most visible, will.”
We home school our daughter, Emma.
If you’re a mum or dad, below are a few p2pnet articles on the subject of child mind-rape. They are, admittedly, one person’s view of things – mine. And like this, they were all were written quickly – too quickly, with all that implies.
But anyway …….
- Advertising can trick kids, August 7, 2007
- Us, Them, p2p and file sharing, December 9, 2006
- MPAA corrupts US Scouts, October 31, 2006
- Open letter to parents, July 2, 2006
- Canada’s Captain Copyright, June 1, 2006
- Hong Kong’s kiddie Net spies, May 31, 2006
- MPAA IP scout badge farce, April 25, 2006
- Record labels’ softer, gentler look, April 15, 2006
- The Big Lie: Part II, June 8, 2005
- MTV buys Neopets, June 20, 2005
- FCC launches Kidszone, September 13, 2004
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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October 26th, 2007 at 11:39 am
zomg god forbid schools teach the truth!
October 26th, 2007 at 11:40 am
**the law