Serendipity35

This month I attended a talk at William Paterson University on fair use for educators given by Brandon Butler. He is the Practitioner-in-Residence at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. Before teaching law, he was the Director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Before that, he was an associate in the Media and Information Technologies practice group at the Washington, D.C. law firm Dow Lohnes PLLC.

One of his main points was that educators need to use fair use and even push against the edges of it. In my years working in instructional design, I had many instances of faculty declaring something to be "fair use" for a new online course section because "that's what I do in my face-to-face class." Of course, that is often not the case.

But one takeaway from the talk was that educators need to use and push at fair use to keep it alive.

I brought up a MOOC I am currently in offered by Coursera and the University of Rochester on "The Music of The Beatles." I'm sure The Beatles have good lawyers, but the idea that there is NO music in the course - not even snippets to illustrate lessons - seems rather sad - and overly cautious.

In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that parody can be protected by the fair-use clause of the Copyright Act of 1976. The ruling came about when the rap group 2 Live Crew used elements from "Oh Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison in their song "Pretty Woman." The 2 Live Crew version uses the same guitar riffs and melody, but the lyrics and storyline has the "pretty woman" as a hairy, bald-headed two-timing woman.

The music publishing company that owns Orbison's song sued Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew for copyright violation saying he used too much of the original work and gained commercially from it. Campbell argued that he had fair use and the Supreme Court agreed. Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote, "Like less ostensibly humorous forms of criticism, [parody] can provide social benefit by shedding light on an earlier work and, in the process, creating a new one."

The revamped Google search tool (illustrated above) allows you to search based on reuse rights. The photo-sharing site Flickr allows for search of the photos that a particular kind of Creative Commons license.

The Flickr Creative Commons license has several permutations which are designed to provide a creator with more flexibility than copyright provides without requiring the creator to give up copyright. It is very helpful for people looking to “remix” materials originally created by someone else and then shared online with a license that allows remixing.

Images are only one sort of digital content available online with Creative Commons licenses. They are used for audio, video, text documents, slide presentations - and this blog.

The Search.CreativeCommons.org site is not exactly a search engine but metasearch using other search engines and filtering for CC-licensed material. The search results should be only materials licensed for those particular needs. (You should double check just to be sure.)

At DiscoverEd.CreativeCommons.org site is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. This search prototype hopefully will allow you to explore metadata enhanced search, specifically for OER. Unlike most search engines, it can incorporate data provided by the resource publisher or curator.

Some more sources of information:

Open Access and creative common sense - a 2004 interview with Lawrence Lessig from Open Access Now

A Call For Copyright Rebellion by Steve Kolowish – InsideHigherEd

Free Culture and Remix, by Lawrence Lessig - two books available for purchase, or for free PDF download under a Creative Commons license.

Butler's talk is available online through NJVid and allows you to embed it. It also carries the following Rights Declaration: This video is protected by copyright. You are free to view it but not download or remix it. Please contact the licensing institution for further information about how you may use this video.