In this section, I will focus on Copyright legislation and policy, particularly pertaining to ‘Open’ environments and learning materials.
As part of the ‘Brookes Open Online Courses’ (BOOC) Moodle environment (the VLE where several MOOCs and ‘Open’ courses ran), I thought it prudent to implement a ‘Copyright and Takedown policy’. Although every effort had been made to ensure that nothing within the VLE infringed UK law. However, there may be circumstances when we would need to remove an item. These circumstances include copyright infringement, plagiarism and data protection issues.
When designing courses /modules, we should ensure that we own all the materials (or have the right to use them) and that all authors and borrowed sources appear credited, e.g. pictures, documents, youtube videos etc.
We released all (Unless stated otherwise) content in Open Online Courses at Oxford Brookes University as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Using this Creative Commons licence we made it clear (in a human-readable summary) how we expected staff, visiting educators and students what terms they could use our materials.
As BOOC is an ‘open’ environment this is doubly important as it could easly legally impact us and ‘traditionally’:
Teaching staff are likely to be a challenging audience, as traditionally they may perceive copyright as a restriction that gets in the way of the education process. The restriction is not just perceived from an ideological perspective – the process of getting copyright permission is often seen as time consuming and overly complicated.
Copyright and E-learning: a guide for practitioners – Chapter 6: Copyright education and training
https://copyrightliteracy.org/publications/copyright-and-e-learning/
In my experience, on reflection, working with staff and their courses / modules. Once Copyright law is explained (and more specifically the consequences of not following it) they have generally been very understanding and compliant. I also encourage staff to contact me if they have any queries regarding using (potentially) copyrighted materials as part of their learning materials.
I encounter often an issue staff have is that copyright law affects printed materials differently to ‘online’ materials. If a member of staff wanted to incorporate a piece of copyrighted work to be shared with students, only 5% could be used. Whereas the majority of online materials can be shared as a complete document / work, if attributed correctly.
Additionally, Copyright law is constantly being refined. Most recently with the Article 13 (now formally titled ‘Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market‘) Copyright law (which critics say could change the internet) has been voted in by the European Parliament. The new laws, will hold technology firms responsible for material posted without copyright permission. This sparked a wholesale panic on the internet as the literature (at the time) would even ban memes.
The European Commission copyright proposal has since ‘formally‘ stated that this will not kill memes, online encyclopaedias or the way we use the internet.
There’s much controversy surrounding Article 13, critics previously slammed it for forcing online platforms to check all material that is uploaded to their platforms for potential violations, rather than relying on users to flag material. The argument is that this will place a disproportionately large burden on smaller organisations.
As computers and the internet are still ‘fairly’ young, especially in regards to teaching and learning, and are still developing faster and faster (incorporating Virtual Reality ‘in the classroom’ is becoming more prevalent). Copyright law is still several years / decades behind and must adapt to protect copyright owners.
If this Law is enforced to the extent that it is written (ie: kill memes, as nothing has been ratified yet) it could disturb teaching and learning as sources of online media (wikipedia, news websites, scholarly journals, etc) would be affected forcing site administrators to be much more selective with what they host. This is not necessarily a bad thing as the internet can be a little of a ‘wild west’ at points / places, but this situation is something to watch given the broad sweeping impact this could cause.