Memorandum submitted by NAACE
1. NAACE
Naace is the professional association for those
who are concerned with advancing education through the appropriate
use of information and communications technology. The association
was established in 1984 and has become the key influential professional
association for those working in ICT in Education.
Naace:
— provides information, support, professional
development and networking opportunities to those involved in
any way in the use of information and communications technology
in education;
— advises national and local bodies
on matters relating to information and communications technology
in education;
— is involved in the development and
evolution of national strategies for information and communications
technology in schools and colleges and provides a forum for consultation
on all matters relating to information and communications technology
in education; and
— advises organisations concerned with
the production of computer hardware, software and learning resources
in support of information and communications technology in education.
2. CURRENT LICENCING
SYSTEMS FOR
NEW MEDIA
IN SCHOOLS
With specific reference to schools:
(i) The advent of new technologies for file
sharing over the internet is revolutionising personal learning
and although licensing schemes for Local Authorities are already
in place such as the ERA EDUCATIONAL RECORDING AGENCY licence
(http://www.era.org.uk/) which covers:
— use recordings with interactive whiteboards;
— transfer recordings onto a server
for easier access via classroom computers;
— stream recordings to on-site computers
for open-access learning; and
— include recordings on virtual learning
environments for use on site;
these conditions do not accommodate the new
media and the ease with which they can be copied, changed and
shared.
(ii) However as virtual learning networks
grow beyond the school there is going to be an increasing licencing
issue with transparency of sharing multimedia learning materials.
Also in the last two years with the increasing use of file sharing
and roll out of broadband there has been an increase in the use
of Mashups—where teenagers disassemble and reassemble existing
media to create new video forms—VJ (video jockeys disaggregate
and reassemble video often to music tracks) to make new art forms.
(iii) This is a new art form where samples
of video and music tracks are ripped and recombined to make new
artifacts. This is common practice amongst teenagers all over
the world at present—a lot of the activity is illegal.
The problem with the ERA recording licence is
that it is just that—it is a recording licence.
3. WHAT ERA DOES
NOT COVER
(i) Although ERA allows the ripping and
tagging of clips and their inclusion in Powerpoints within educational
institutions by teachers, it does not cover students copying,
amending and distributing media based on source video that is
copyright.
(ii) The ERA recording licence does not
take into consideration the fact that VLE (Virtual Learning Platforms)
are increasingly being accessed from outside the home and that
learning is going on in an anywhere, anytime basis. In fact an
analogy between plagiarism and academic referencing can be made
here. Plagiarism is straightforward copying without attribution
and passing off a work as your own—referencing is inclusion
of extracts from other authors as a basis of an argument and they
are cited and attributed. T S Eliot's The Waste land is littered
with a hotpotch of different references and quotes combined with
his original writing to make one of the most innovative and influential
poems of the 20th Century for example.
4. THE IMPORTANCE
OF DIGITAL
LITERACY AND
CULTURE
(i) In the definitive BECTA report (Evaluation
report of the teaching and learning with digital video assets
pilot 2003-04) on the use of digital video assets used in schools—the
authors Kevin Burden (Director Cascade, University of Hull) and
Theo Kuechel (Research Consultant) outlined an increasingly realistic
scenario:
"It is important that education and schools
become aware of the emergence of digital working processes and
make full use of the opportunities offered by digital media. This
is important from both a pedagogical and a technical perspective.
In A Digitally Driven Curriculum Professor Buckingham argues that
there is now a need for a digitally driven curriculum wherein
children have to develop critical and analytical skills in order
to interpret digital media (Buckingham (ed.), 2001, p 13). In
order to enable them to achieve this, he feels that they should
be actively involved in producing media. The teachers involved
in the project shared this view, pointing out that when repurposing
digital video assets and undertaking digital video editing, the
deconstructing and re-assembling of the component parts of digital
media led to greater understanding on the children's part."
(ii) Paul Gerhardt (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/gerhardt/
) Director Creative Archive BBC said recently in the July online
JISC journal—Ariadne :
"There is also growing evidence that media
files are the new currency of the Web. The downloading and sharing
of moving image files is driving the latest phase in the growth
of the Internet, following the previous waves of text, pictures
and music. In 2003, the downloading of video and other files grew
to make up slightly more than half (51.3%) of all file sharing
in OECD countries, while music downloading fell to 48.6% [1].
The technology now exists for moving images to acquire the same
intrinsic characteristics as text: for people to carry with them,
to quote from, to manipulate, and to share with others. Almost
all of this activity contravenes existing copyright arrangements—particularly
broadcasting, which remains geared to providing one or two `opportunities
to view'."
(iii) Tessa Jowell said at the Oxford internet
institute's webcast (approx 34 mins in) on 19 January 2006
"As with all knowledge, passing it on is
an active not a passive verb. And I don't exaggerate when I say
that media literacy in its wider sense, is as important to our
development as was universal literacy in the 19th century. Then
the written word was the only passport to knowledge, now there
are very many more and the most insidious digital divide is between
those equipped to understand that and those who aren't ... So
media literacy is an essential tool of modern citizenship—the
more confidence people have in the use of their media, the more
effectively and creatively they will engage with it and this creativity
benefits broadcasters and other content creators by feeding back
into new creators and new content. So media literacy is crucial
to widening access to skills and deriving a dynamic, successful,
creative economy ... The pace of change won't slow, it will intensify
and we need to harness it for our, our society's and the economy's
benefit ... So Britain is in pole position to benefit from this
change like almost nowhere else we could have the most innovative
industry on earth working in converged media that delivers the
highest standards on earth. But only if we plan it that way and
only if all of us including regulators and government walk into
theatuture with our eyes open."
(iv) RSA aspirational Manifesto
"Creativity and investment should be recognised
and rewarded. The purpose of intellectual property law (such as
copyright and patents) should be, now as it was in the past, to
ensure both the sharing of knowledge and the rewarding of innovation.
The expansion in the law's breadth, scope and term over the last
30 years has resulted in an intellectual property regime which
is radically out of line with modern technological, economic and
social trends. This threatens the chain of creativity and innovation
on which we and future generations depend."
5. THE PROBLEM
OF UNDERLYING
RIGHTS IN
BROADCASTING
(i) However the problem with disaggregation
of media, and video in particular, is that there are frequent
"underlying rights" issues with producers. Even though,
with the BBC CREATIVE ARCHIVE, schools can generally:
— search for legally cleared content—from
extracts to whole programmes;
— preview and download non-broadcast
quality versions;
— modify and create their own versions;
and
— share with others and the BBC—on
a non-commercial basis;
but underlying rights concerns by producers
can still bar certain parts of programmes (extracts of music,
voiceovers, fill in video, soundtrack, background images, performers/
presenters contributions—the list goes on) that do not have
copyright clearance. A mechanism for releasing the clearance on
these underlying rights generally within the UK domain within
the educational system would be first thing to tackle otherwise
it will become a barrier to innovation.
6. A LICENCING
SYSTEM THAT
ALLOWS INNOVATION,
CREATIVITY AND
PARITY
(i) Therefore a licencing system that accommodates
and does not stifle creativity is essential as media becomes freely
available to copy, disassemble, reassemble and distribute around
these networks and on converged systems such as mobile networks—especially
in education. The difference between copying and mass distribution
on the one hand and reworking media on the other must be stated
and allowed for.
(ii) It is one thing for a student to rip
an entire DVD and distribute it over a network to fellow students
but it is entirely another matter if a student on a visual arts
and media course were to rip the same DVD, sample short clips
and recontextualise them within the confines of a creative project—making
an entirely different artwork. In the latter case it would be
stifling creativity and the developing of expertise of those skills
to produce new and exciting media if underlying rights issues
were to become a bar to constructing good models of media literacy.
The basis for these skills that will move the UK economy on through
innovation and the knowledge capital generated will hit an intellectual
and legal cul de sac and this must be addressed. On the one hand
producers need to be reassured that their underlying rights will
not be undermined and revenues lost and on the other a licence
should allow for free use within the educational system providing
a blanket licencing fee is paid by all institutions. In that way
producers and performers are paid for content and schools and
educational systems are free to reconfigure media to model and
produce new artforms and media providing they do not sell or perform
for revenues and that they gain corresponding non-theatric licences
if supplying content in a wider arena; and if what they produce
is of value then a mechanism should be found to negotiate a contract
to sell on.
(iii) With Open Source software and emerging
technologies the ease and ubiquity of file sharing over networks
is becoming ubiquitous. In the Web 2.0 roll out the old models
of attaching spend to products is becoming more inappropriate
and existing copyright laws just cannot cope. As has already been
quoted—a fair amount of traffic over the internet is of
illegal file sharing of multimedia objects. There are just not
enough copyright lawyers to police or take litigation against
such a flood. Surely a licencing system for a service as opposed
to a product would be far more logical. And licences for specific
educational communities a precursor to allowing fair use and intellectual
freedom to disaggregate and reassemble media for education and
training purposes? A tagging system for online content within
educational systems might be a logical way forward to audit use
...
7. METATAGGING
AND LICENCING
MODELS IN
EXISTENCE
(i) In recent months the use of metadata
systems to tag information attached to multimedia objects has
become extremely popular and efficient. The use of Creative Commons
licences on the Flickr (http://www.flickr.com ) photo sharing
site, for example, allows authors of content to tag their pictures
(and by extension media) with licenses stating what form of copyright
they would allow to be attached to their images. Community video
sites such as http://www.ourmedia.com (part of the Prelinger Archive)
in the United States allows community and non-commercial organisations
to upload video and film media in particular on the proviso that
it is freely shareable and available for download. Certain restrictions
(such as not disassembling, disaggregating media etc) can be attached
by means of a searchable tag. Metadata tagging systems and URL
bookmarking sites such as http://del.icio.us have led to like
minded user groups coalescing around shared interests. A system
in education whereby users could tag content with reference to
existing and future UK territorial licencing provision not unlike
that of the Creative Commons model—would be of use with
extensions to allow for underlying licencing issues legislated
for and agreed with the broadcasting industry, producers and underlying
rights.
(ii) The pure volume of media generated already
by early adopters and tagged for use over the internet is beginning
to grow exponentially. http://video.google.com which has a host
of Terms, Conditions and exclusion clauses at: http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=31704—is
now a major provider of a massive repository of Digital Video
content available for download through paying and non-paying methods.
Their model is to get providers to put up guarantees they are
not infringing copyright and then give Terms and Conditions for
contacting them if copyright is infringed: http://www.google.com/video_dmca.html
(iii) However—in the broadcasting
world, especially the commercial media broadcasting world, the
use of non-theatrical licences over specific geographical territories
is quite specific when attached to public paid non-paid performances
even within educational institutions—in the "virtual"
realm it is quite possible to stream, in real time, a film over
networks and this too needs to be considered when licencing.
(iv) In the UK the BBC has adopted a Creative
Archive licences for use with schools and this is very territory
specific in that the site where multimedia artifacts reside is
locked to a UK IP (internet Protocol domain specifically) under
terms of its UK licence. This is unfortunate in that it excludes
British schools overseas and the educational institutions in the
Armed Forces which fall foul of such a clause. It also does not
address, in some cases, the problem of "underlying licence
issues" already outlined above.
(v) The final report from the CIA has begun
to address these concerns with an examination of common use and
click use licences.
1. Resources should be made available for
reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not.
2. The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained
as possible. For example, resources should be made available for
commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible.
3. The range of permitted uses of resources
should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right
to modify the resource and produce derivative works from it.
4. Reuse should be encouraged by permitting
others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis.
5. Resources should be made directly available
and discoverable electronically whenever possible.
6. The conditions of use for each resource
should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable
at the point of discovery.
This study was commissioned by Becta, the British
Library, DfES, JISC and the MLA on behalf of the CIE group.
8. REPOSITORIES
(i) Digital repository issues arise from
the holding of content on servers and distributed by VLEs and
these are issues that also need to be addressed. Issues of caches
and archives linked to electronic portfolios, issues of duplication
and, again, tagging will emerge as has been made evident by the
JISC Digitised Content in the UKResearch Library and Archives
Sector A report to the Consortium of Research Libraries and the
Joint Information Systems Committee in April 2005. It was interesting
to note that in that report, although metadata systems such as
Dublin Core et al were mentioned folksonomies or tagsonomies were
not, in this context—as these are proving to be very effective
in finding, searching, retrieving and sharing content on the wider
internet on sites such as del.icio.us and other emerging technology
enterprises.
9. CONCLUSIONS
(i) The current licencing provision, especially
for the schools sector, with regard to digital and converging
media and their usage across educational networks and beyond is
fairly inadequate at the present time.
(ii) The present licencing models do not
allow for students copying, disaggregating, amending and distributing
media based on source digital assets that is copyright across
networks.
(iii) With specific reference to where the
balance should lie between the rights of creators and the expectations
of consumers then a review and implementation of a licencing system
more in tune with actual usage would be appropriate; one that
takes into account the underlying rights problem for dis and reaggregation
of digital resources under educational licences possibly within
common use and creative archive type model but with the appropriate
revenues due to address "underlying rights" and in rare
cases the localised broadcast of non-theatric performance.
28 February 2006
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