Streaming Media Rant
I threw this out to the NMC community last week, so I thought it would be good to post here as well…
This is an interesting perspective as a preface to this: http://www.adobe.com/solutions/broadcast/pdfs/forrester_report.pdfWe (at work) have made a concerted effort to comply to the TEACH act for fair use rights in digitizing media for educational purposes. Under the TEACH act, an accredited institution must take measures to ensure that digitized dramatic content must not be able to be replicated or archived by those who would consume it."11. While the transmission of distance education content may be conducted by diverse technological means, an institution deploying "digital transmissions" must apply technical measures to prevent "retention of the work in accessible form by recipients of the transmission . . . for longer than the class session." The statute offers no clarification about the meaning of a "class session," but language throughout the statute suggests that any given transmission would require a finite amount of time, and students would be unable to access it after a designated time. Also, in the case of "digital transmissions," the institution must apply "technological measures" to prevent recipients of the content from engaging in "unauthorized further dissemination of the work in accessible form." Both of these restrictions address concerns from copyright owners that students might receive, store, and share the copyrighted content. Both of these provisions of the statute call upon the institution to implement technological controls on methods for delivery, terms of accessibility, and realistic abilities for students to download or share copyrighted content. These provisions specifically demand application of "technological measures" that would restrict uses of the content "in the ordinary course of their operations." In other words, when the restrictive controls are used in an "ordinary" manner, they will safeguard against unauthorized reproduction and dissemination. This language apparently protects the institution, should someone "hack" the controls and circumvent imperfect technology." (Source: http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/teach_summary.htm)The reason I ask this is that our campus has made use of the Helix Community Streaming server and has been delivering content using RealNetworks’ proprietary streaming format. Because at the time the decision was made it seemed to work and in our minds we were doing our best to deliver a good learning medium via online video and protecting ourselves in the process. Also, from a usability standpoint, many instructors who deploy media on the server encourage their students to download the latest free version of RealPlayer. I’ll refrain from the criticism of the annoyances that deploying the software creates (I’ll trust anyone replying to this message will do likewise)I’ve not delved into it too much but the Windows version has a blatant feature embedded into the client that allows the user to save streamed media directly to their computer. It is painfully obvious that once installed, any of our instructors and media developers who have gone to great strides to protect content because the technology at the time was originally invented to protect it, is now left with a big problem to fix. While our streaming media initiative is still very young (we aren’t delivering much copyrighted work at this time), I would like to address it before it gets blown out of proportion. I have some ideas already but I’d like to ask what everyone else is doing for reference.It seems like media technology companies have failed to address the impact that their ‘bowing’ to the trend of the general community of media consumers finding a way to download video content anyway shouldn’t affect education in the least bit, but if I’m reading into this correctly it seems like they’ve left educators out of the loop on their decision.So I guess my point is three-fold: 1. Am I reading into this correctly given our circumstance, that we aren’t covered under the TEACH act anymore? 2. Is anyone else aware of this and affected by it? 3. Since RealMedia is a proprietary format, it isn’t easily convertable into another more desireable format. What would you be able to offer as a suggestion what to do with our instructors’ content?Any insights would be appreciated.
