Streaming Video: AIME Takes On UCLA
In a widely reported dispute, the Association for Information and Media Equipment (AIME) is challenging the manner in which the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) permits faculty members to stream video to course Web sites. While no lawsuit has been filed to date, UCLA issued a press release on February 11, 2010 announcing it “temporarily suspended the posting of streamed content, effective at the start of winter quarter in January 2010.”
AIMEE is a trade association representing businesses and organizations in the educational film/video field. According to its web site, its corporate members include Ambrose Video Publishing, Films Media Group, Learn360 Sunburst Visual Media, PBS Video, Scc TV/Iris Education and Social Studies School Service. On its home page (http://www.aime.org) AIMEE describes itself as “a non-profit membership organization offering copyright information and support to teachers, librarians, media center directors, producers and distributors of informational film, video, interactive technologies, computer software and equipment. AIME serves as your organization’s copyright resource.” The copyright resource theme carries through many other links on the site. For example, the Newsletter link displays a listing of recent articles all of which have a legal bent and most of which have a copyright bent. Similarly, the link entitled “Link” takes users to a listing of related web sites which again all have a copyright law orientation. One might look at all of this with a shrug and a “so what.” However, it bears noting in the context of a comment reportedly made by AIME’s president, Allen Dohra, when he was interviewed by Inside Higher Ed about UCLA. Dohra reportedly claimed “We have leads in terms of other universities, and we do plan to investigate further.”
Gleaning from news reports, the UCLA press release and minutes from UCLA’s Faculty Committee on Educational Technology, it appears that UCLA allowed faculty members to stream video to password protected course web sites. Then, enrolled students accessed the course web site to watch the assigned films as outside of class assignments. UCLA believes this is allowed under fair use. AIME disagrees.
Without going in to the legal minutia that gives people headaches, suffice to say that this is an unsettled area of law. That is, there isn’t a court case from the past establishing a clear precedent. The short version of the issue is that streaming video is a “transmission.” Under the copyright statute as written by Congress, “transmissions” fall under different rules than doing something like posting an article or link. To make matters a bit more complicated, there are two categories of “transmissions:” those that are done under the TEACH Act (i.e. by institutions that are TEACH Act compliant) and those that are done without the benefit of the TEACH Act (and therefore must rely on other rules of law such as fair use). UCLA is relying on fair use.
Essentially, AIME believes that educational institutions can be required to purchase a license to “transmit” film and video to multiple students. UCLA (and many other institutions with similar practices) believe that as long as they lawfully won the video or film being streamed, streaming to enrolled students via a secured system is usually permissible.
It is both true and a cliché to point out that this is but one of a continuing line of copyright challenges to new and emerging technologies that highlights the failure of copyright law to keep pace with those technologies and current educational practice. If AIME succeeds, many educators will return to past practices that pre-date the new technology such as requiring students to purchase personal copies, placing copies on reserve in a library or media lab, showing them in class, or simply eliminating them from the course. In that scenario, AIME wins the battle but loses the war. Its interpretation of copyright law and fair use carries the day but with little or no increase in revenues from the sale of multiple user licenses.