| Professors use
grant to explore copyright issues BY MIKE UNGER Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, AU professors whose research on the use of copyrighted materials changed the documentary film industry, will now turn their attention to the world of media literacy. Using a $600,000 grant awarded to their partner, Renee Hobbs, director of Temple University’s Media Education Lab in its School of Communications and Theater, the professors plan to create a code of best practices for educators and students to consult when confronted with questions about the use of copyrighted material. “We live in an age in which students, young people, and for that matter, adults’ ability to read critically and participate actively in the media environment is an important aspect of citizenship,” said Jaszi, director of the Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. “We believe that the efforts of teachers to help students to become informed citizens of the world of media is being hampered by the restrictive understandings of copyright law that are circulating in this educational community. It’s fairly obvious that if you want to make effective lessons and you want your students to do effective assignments that involve critical use of the media, you have to use media.” The professors are now studying the depth of the problem. They expect to report their initial findings June 22 at the annual meeting of the Association for Media Literacy. “We’re pretty convinced that it’s a big problem, but we’re not convinced that the people who are having these problems know it’s a problem,” said Aufderheide, director of AU’s Center for Social Media in the School of Communication. “A lot of teachers of media literacy are very confused about the law—they’re convinced that whatever they’re doing is wrong, but they’re hoping that nobody is going to talk about it.” “The goal here really isn’t to change anything, because we think that the law, properly understood, actually gives media educators and their students a lot of latitude in which to operate,” Jaszi said. “The goal is to work with media educators to clarify this set of issues by helping them develop their own consensus statement about what constitutes fair and good use.” Aufderheide and Jaszi previously created a code of best practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials in documentary films, a project that has changed the business. “People misunderstood the capacity of copyright law,” Aufderheide said. “They failed to realize that copyright is set up as a balancing act. Creativity was being foregone and being deformed because people didn’t realize they didn’t have those rights. What the statement of best practices did was make public for them what their own standards were. That very act alone changed industry practice. In the year and a half since the document was created, documentary filmmakers have been educated about the law. That simple act saved millions of dollars in copyright clearances that they didn’t need to get; it put films into the marketplace that [otherwise] were never going to be shown; it spurred public television to use this tool to be able to create more work and get more work on the air.” The grant comes from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which also helped fund the documentary film code of best practices project. “Our funders have seen the success of this model and they think it should spread,” Aufderheide said. “It solves a problem for this contingency because it serves as an important model for other creative communities. It says education can really change practices when you can make public an explicit consensus among creative practitioners. You liberate the potential of copyright law. The terms of fair use in copyright law are vague on purpose. But it does take some work for creative communities to understand what it means in their field.” |
