Hi Declan, Very good questions. Similarly, I cannot claim to be a legal professional so my thoughts do not constitute legal opinion. However, working with the idiosyncrasies of copyright in the free culture movement - one does acquire valuable prior learning through experience.
Steve Foerster, one of WikiEducator's Interim Advisory Board members has recently posted reflection on fair use over at Terra Incognito - see: http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2007/11/14/fair-use-as-a-complement-to-open-licensing/ So I hope Steve will wade in with further advice to my reflections. The fair usage doctrine applies to the US. In other parts of the world this is typically dealt with under the "fair dealing" concept. The problem is that WIkiEducator is an international project, and interpretations of fair dealing within national legislation differ. The fair use doctrine is reasonable defensible within the educational context of face-to-face teaching. So for example if you show a book cover image on the data projector in a face-to-face class, for example discussing the ethics of marketing in a Philosophy course - I think one is reasonably well covered under fair use/fair dealing. However, in distance education which very often relies on printed study materials under their own copyright, from my own experience we would always clear the copyright use of such images for education with the publisher and not rely on fair dealing. Given the number of refusals we had, and the strict requirements to specify the maximum print run etc - I'm doubtful of the protections under fair dealing in this context. Very soon, WikiEducator will have the capabilities of producing print- based study guides in pdf format directly from the site. To give a practical example of a copyright issue regarding images. I noticed a growing number of WikiEducators sourcing images from Flickr using the Creative Commons Search. In some cases authors were inserting images with the NC restriction. This is not compatible with our license. Fortunately images are discrete objects which can be identified separately. So we developed a Flickr attribution template, see: http://www.wikieducator.org/Template:FA What the template does is insert a category for pages using Flickr images to help us out when we need to sort out non-free images from free images. The problem will arise when a future Wikieducator (lets for the sake of argument assume that this is a publisher) produces a studyguide which they want to market. Clearly in this scenario they would not be able to use NC images so we need a mechanism to identify these problems easily. I assume that you were thinking of using the Fair Use Book template when uploading an image. Assuming all users incorporate the template - we will have a mechanism to identify all pages on the wiki that are potential risk candidates. At least, until I can get a legal opinion on this for WikiEducator this approach should suffice. In an ideal world I try to encourage all WikiEducators to use free content where ever possible - fair usage is an uncomfortable grey area when WikiEducator content is used in different formats. However, I do understand that in some situations it is necessary to go this route for distinct educational purposes. Until now this has not been a major issue for us - but as WikiEducator grows, we will need to find appropriate solutions to overcome these challenges. Gee ... copyright is a frustrating challenge for educators who want to share knowledge <smile>. No doubt - folk will be more confused with my explanation - my apologies, I didn't invent copyright. Just trying to figure out how to live an honest life. Cheers Wayne On Nov 27, 7:34 pm, Declan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > I just added a book cover template to the WikiEducator site (based > directly on the wikipedia book cover template). When working on this > with students earlier this year I contacted four publishers and asked > if they felt that use of a low resolution image book cover was fair > use. I received one reply from just one publishers lawyer and he > agreed with my interpretation. > > I was curious if this issue has been tossed around already in this > group (I'm a newbie). > > I see the need also for templates to tag images in the public domain > (with sub categories for images with expired copyrights, images > created by government agencies and placed in the public domain). > > Any thoughts? I can't claim any expertise in this area, but I see > Wikipedia as an example of one approach to handling these issues. > > Cheers, > > Declan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
