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a new thread/Multimedia 

Stan Diamond asked the a question the other day (reproduced below), which
caused me to get out the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia
and to dust them off.  In particular, he is asking librarians to comment
on why the MM guidelines, the subject of so much hard work and consensus
are not favored by our premier library associations.  It is a good and
fair question.  I leave it to others to comment from a more appropriate
experience in libraries and education.  My observations are two simple
ones: 

1. The "bright lines" established in Section 4 (Limitations) feel very
definite (and very much constrained)  particularly with respect to portion
limitations.  They do not seem to me to encourage educators to use
multimedia for teaching/instruction.  For example, a fair use of motion
media will never be more than 3 minutes; music extracts will never include
more than 30 seconds, and so on.  This reminded me of the classroom
guidelines (CONTU)  which, even though they feel more generous, if
anything, have been problematic for college and university teaching ever
since they were presented.  There is a lot of good language that leads up
to these limitations; it makes one feel very comfortable with these
guidelines, until one gets to that particular limitations section, after
which my own reaction is one of shock. 

2.  Note something very interesting, related to our fair use discussion
on this list.  Section 6.7 reads:  "Fair use and these guidelines shall
not preempt or supersede licenses and contractual obligations."  Now,
there's a view of the relationship between copyright (at least the fair
use part of it) and licenses!  As Stan says, a large number of
organizations endorsed this Multimedia draft.  This leads me to think
that a large number of influential people in the information community
believe that licenses trump copyright, right?

Ann Okerson
Associate University Librarian
Yale University
Ann.Okerson@yale.edu
_________________________
Stan Diamond wrote:

>I am not a librarian and therefore not a member of either organization,
>and I do not understand why librarians would be opposed to any guidelines
>which extend the scope of fair use, while at the same time simplifying
>the creation process for faculty and students. Nor do I understand why
>these organizations feel the need to oppose the multimedia guidelines
>when multimedia teaching packages are not typically developed and created
>in a library environment. We see these guidelines as providing a safe
>harbor for faculty and media professional engaged in the production of
>such products to support and enhance their teaching, and feel the
>existance of such a safe harbor will provide strong encouragement to
>faculty and administrators to expand the use of these powerful teaching
>tools.


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