Media Wonk

Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Teaching copyright on campus - December 10, 2007

Are American colleges and universities missing a teachable moment about the role of copyright in the society? The rough consensus among participants at the Copyright and the University symposium at George Washington University in Washington, DC, Monday was that they are.

"Higher education is supposed to help students develop the tools for critical thinking, but most of the copyright education you get on campus does not involve critical thinking," lamented James Gibson, associate professor of law at the University of Virginia. "It's mostly finger-wagging and telling you about this system of punishment we have waiting for you if you break the rules, so you don't get a lot of buy in from the students."

The symposium was sponsored by the Copyright Alliance, an umbrella group representing the music and motion picture industries, publishers, college and professional sports leagues and other content creators. The aim was to try to grapple with two, inter-related issues: the use of copyrighted materials in the classroom, and the problem of peer-to-peer file-sharing on campus computer networks. Media Wonk moderated one of the panels.

Although no real agreement emerged on how big a problem either issue is, let alone what to do about it, there was general agreement that there is a woeful lack of information about, or understanding of, copyright by nearly all concerned. As a result, the students whose behavior the copyright industries complain about are not being well served.

Nathan Perry, a student at the University of Utah, noted that in his film and journalism classes, professors offered very little input or guidance on questions related to the use of copyrighted materials.

"They basically said, well, just do it this way for this class, but we didn't really learn anything about what to do outside of the class," he said.

That's largely because most professors don't have a very good understanding themselves of copyright law and its limitations, according to Prof. Patricia Aufderheide of the American University School of Communications.

"A lot of them think that getting clearances will be difficult or expensive, or take too long, or whatever. So they either don't use anything, which obviously isn't a good solution for their students, or they use what they want and just close the door," Aufderheide said. "The message that sends to students is you can do what you want if you just close the door."

Aufderheide recently co-authored a study on the issue, which is available here.

That general lack of understanding certainly doesn't help colleges and universities in grappling with the problem of file-sharing over campus networks, an area of keen interest to the music and movie industries.

Yet even that debate, Boulder Management Group founder Warren Arbogast noted, has proceeded largely in an information vacuum. "There's a lot of anecdote, and not a lot of data," he said. "And what empirical data there is doesn't necessarily support what a lot of people infer from the anecdotal data."

With backing from the copyright industries, his group has begun to collect empirical data on the amount and nature of file-sharing on campus through a program at Illinois State University.

Working with the Dean of Libraries there, Arbogast's group has surveyed incoming freshman about their media habits over the past two years while also conducting audits of the university's IT system to compare what students say with what measurements of their actual activity.

Among the program's more interesting findings:

• Only 51% of students at ISU are actively involved in illegal downloading, so it's not true that "everyone is doing it;"
• Most file-sharing over the university network occurs off campus, presumably by students who are simply taking advantage of the school's high-speed access to the Internet. That has implications for the university's legal obligations and liability.

On the other hand, Arbogast noted, incoming students are the most ignorant of all when it comes to copyright.

"A lot of them are really surprised to be told that most of their downloading activity is illegal," he said. "We also asked them how many legal download services they could name and the number they could name was zero. Not even iTunes. So from that perspective, the problem is even larger than the industry thinks it is."

Some of Arbogast's findings can be found here.

[Consumer Trends]  [Digital Copyright]  [Legal]  [R&D]  [Regulation & Legislation]   LEAVE A COMMENT