| Gretchen Wagner General Counsel & Secretary ARTstor |
Maureen Whalen Associate General Counsel J. Paul Getty Trust |
Social software sites like Flickr and YouTube demonstrate the significant appetite among the community at large to engage in collective efforts, as well as the transformative potential of the web in terms of linking people and ideas. Flickr alone has over 1 billion photos, with an estimated 11,547 images “served” per second on busy days.
Yet despite these broader trends toward sharing on the open Internet, educational institutions often are hesitant to engage in online sharing of content because of the fears and uncertainty of infringing third party copyrights. Frequently this means that educational institutions try to build their own resources, replicating efforts undertaken at other institutions and creating redundant content, rather than sharing that content with other educational users. This has also meant that some unique materials that would be of value to the broader educational community are inaccessible because of the uncertainties surrounding copyright.
Through this project briefing, we will explore how the educational community might take a more collaborative approach to sharing content (and in particular visual images) for teaching and study. The session will include a discussion of how the broader copyright disputes in the commercial context are creating norms and laws that are being applied to the educational community, and how the laws – and the educational community – are failing to distinguish between teaching and study, on the one hand, and commercial uses, on the other. The session will also include a discussion of the current unwillingness among educational institutions to rely on the copyright doctrine of fair use in sharing their content with other educational institutions, and how some of those concerns might be addressed collectively. The final part of the project briefing will be a collaborative discussion with attendees exploring specific next steps.
Handout (MS Word)