Tag Archive for 'Fair Use'

OER Copyright Survey

Published
by
Garin Fons
on August 25, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, licensing and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

CCLearn and Open.Michigan are working together to study the ways in which copyright law plays a role in the practices of those who create or help facilitate the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). It is our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the degree to which OER practitioners and users grapple with copyright law issues, and whether those issues pose barriers to the creation, dissemination, and reuse of OER.

We invite you to share your perspectives by taking the OER Copyright Survey and to read more about the study on the Copyright Exceptions and Limitations section of the OpenEd website. The survey should take only 10 - 15 minutes of your time.

If you know of other colleagues - especially individuals outside the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia - who would be interested in participating in this survey, please forward it to them. The survey closes on August 31, so we encourage all to fill it out soon!

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 0 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.

A Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Courseware

Published
by
Garin Fons
on January 27, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, education, hewlett, intellectual property, news, ocw and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

Corona of the Sun during a Solar Eclipse (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright)Â (from flickr commons: http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2534500722/)

A Note from the Fair Use on Open CourseWare team:

All of us have been frustrated by problems with third-party rights for open courseware materials. We know that if we could clarify when fair use applies, we could vastly expand the utility of what we do. And we know that in other cases, creative communities have done that. For instance, documentary filmmakers now find that insurers accept their claims of fair use, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. Similarly, media literacy teachers now can teach without fear, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. These codes of best practices were coordinated by Profs. Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide, through the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

We need a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware. A group of representatives at some of the open courseware universities—MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Creative Commons—have started a project to do this, in coordination with Jaszi and Aufderheide, and with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation and from each of our universities. Each of the eight participating universities’ staff has set aside some part of their workload for this job.

Are you interested in helping to shape a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware? You can participate at several levels. If you would like to become a researcher on the project, just let Lindsey Weeramuni (lweera@mit.edu), the project’s coordinator know. Do you have a story to tell? Write Jaszi and Aufderheide at socialmedia@american.edu and we’ll connect you. Do you think your organization would eventually like to become a signatory? Let Lindsey know and we’ll be in touch when the document has been crafted, for your participation.

We hope to complete this work by September 1, so that the 2009-2010 school year can be a great one for open courseware.

Other questions or comments can also be directed here at open.michigan@umich.edu