The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article describing the efforts of educators to resolve whether provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) conflict with the recently passed Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH).
TEACH became law in November 2002 and was intended to "allow college instructors to use nondramatic works, such as news articles and novels, and portions of dramatic works, such as movies, in online courses without paying fees and without seeking the copyright holder's permission". The DMCA has a provision which prohibits circumvention of technologies that block access to copyrighted material.
Educators are concerned that in order to exercise their rights under TEACH (and indeed their fair-use rights) that it may be necessary to circumvent such blocking technologies and thus to run afoul of the DMCA. They would like a clear ruling from the Copyright Office indicating that either the DMCA's provision does not apply to such cases or to expressly create an exception to the DMCA for such cases.
Educators would sometimes need to bypass copying protections to use materials from CDs and DVDs for distance education, as permitted by the Teach Act. "The problem arises when digital materials are not also released in non-digital formats that the colleges can fall back on, such as print." Read the whole article for more.
Posted by Brian at March 18, 2003 12:22 PM | TrackBack