Piracy and Copyright

As campuses receive an increasing number of DMCA notices and settlement letters, and as more and different technological solutions of varying worth arrive and new legal threats emerge, IT organizations struggle to understand the law and create the right educational, disciplinary, technological, or market approaches that best correspond to the culture, tradition, and missions of the institution. In this session we will delve into the history of P2P file sharing; explain the basics of the applicable laws, including the different standards and methods used by the RIAA to protect its rights; and tell the stories of two campuses with very different DMCA experiences. We will discuss the different ways that colleges and universities respond to DMCA notices and subpoenas and touch on the new language in the 2008 Higher Education Reauthorization. We will close with an audience discussion of how we got here and where we go next.

Buried within the 1,200 well-intentioned, time- and money-wasting pages of the HEOA are a couple of provisions related to copyright infringement on campus networks. The first provision is relatively benign: it requires every college and university in the country to provide students annually with a list of details about copyright law and campus policies for detecting and punishing infringement. Of course, nearly every campus already does this as part of orientation, in some cases quite creatively.

As online video burgeons, so do questions about what kinds of uses of copyrighted works are legal online. Inevitably, those questions will be settled at least as much by practice and private negotiation as by legal action. Recent discussions of filtering and monitoring practices for platform providers show the importance of identifying lawful uses, while meeting industry concern to limit unauthorized use of copyrighted material. This study showcases user practices in use of copyrighted works within their own online videos at the dawn of this process. It identifies nine common kinds of re-appropriation practices, including satire and parody, criticism, and video diaries. It shows that a substantial amount of user-generated video uses copyrighted material in ways that are eligible for fair use consideration, although no coordinated work has yet been done to understand such practices through the fair use lens.
Thus, a significant set of creative practices is potentially both legal and at risk of curtailment by currently discussed ways to control online piracy and theft of copyrighted works.

The technology-driven disruptions of the knowledge economy offer higher education an enormous opportunity to remake ourselves - this time around collaboration, exploration, and engagement with the wider world.