[Ashley Salter]

Questions related to copyright and the use of electronic materials usually seem the most challenging to faculty and students alike. Please share some of your questions related to copyright and the use of electronic materials or share some of the resources you use to resolve these questions.

Ashley Salter
University of Central Florida

[Wendy Howard]

Is anybody aware of copyright issues related to embedding YouTube videos in courses?

For example, I wanted to post this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E12H1NUDkT0 

[Kelvin Thompson, Ed.D.]

I think generally linking to YouTubes is fine. Of course, the real problem comes when folks upload to YouTube stuff that isn’t theirs to upload.

I know I’ve seen many faculty who “hide” behind the fact that they’re merely linking to a YouTube video that already exists (even though any reasonable person recognizes that the video content is owned by someone else).

I hope that helps! 🙂

Kelvin

Kelvin Thompson, Ed.D.
University of Central Florida
http://linkedin.com/in/drkelvinthompson

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Wendy Howard, Jonathan Pizzo

[Mathieu Plourde]

Echoing Kelvin’s answer. Linking or embedding doesn’t trigger copyright, since you did not make a copy to host on your own site, but it doesn’t mean the person who uploaded the resource had the right to do so.

Mathieu Plourde, MBA
Learning Experience Designer, Bisk

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Shelly Wyatt, Ashley Salter

[Sara McCool]

I was very happy to see all of these responses to this post. In my position, I am usually the “copyright police.” I would agree with what everyone has stated here in terms of linking to a copyrighted video from Youtube, you are not infringing on copyright, however, you are relying on someone else infringing on copyright.

Wendy, in terms of the video you share, it actually has the copyright terms on it. It is a small image but it has the “attribution” symbol and “non-commercial use” symbol. So you can use it as long as you attribute where it came from. I find most instructional videos like this have their copyright terms in the description of the video.
-Sara

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Wendy Howard, Ashley Salter

[Jason E. Mock, MEd]

Also agree with Kelvin. Other risk factors in linking to YouTube is the risk of “link rot” (the video being pulled down, either because someone called them out on violating copyright or just because they wanted to) and the fact that YouTube is blocked in China, U.S. Military Bases foreign and domestic, and in some corporate environments.

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Ashley Salter, Shelly Wyatt

[Kim Manning]

I am interested in knowing if anyone has developed a copyright guide or one stop resource for instructional designers to use as a checklist when developing courses.

[Sara McCool]

I have a “few” somewhat finished floating around. 😀
I will add you as a friend and send you what I can find when I am back in the office next week!
-Sara

[James Paradiso]

At this point in the conversation, it’s fair to say using YouTube, as a form of reliable “copyright-compliant” content, in academia has its challenges. We can attempt to rely on our best judgement to determine whether or not a video’s content infringes copyright (or has been licensed appropriately), but doing so risks perpetuating any such violation(s). The good news is there are quite a few alternatives to YouTube, particularly if we are in search of primary sources to supplement our academic courses. EdX (https://www.edx.org/), for example, hosts a number of open courses on an open-source platform (https://open.edx.org/) that cover a wide array of content areas.

I recently worked on a project with a faculty member where the course had an outdated textbook that wasn’t historically well-received by students; therefore, we located a similar iteration of this course on edX and gleaned multimedia and text from it to create a deliverable online learning experience. (All the materials in the original course are CC BY-NC-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ and continue as such in the course we created.) Sure, vetting videos is time-consuming no matter which way we look at it, but a large majority of edX courses are developed by reputable universities around the world, which increases the likelihood of finding quality, original content that is properly documented.

In so far as how this media can be displayed in an online course, I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with General Counsel (i.e. the university legal team) to discuss this very matter, and the resource that best sums up that conversation can be found on the following website: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/linking-copyrighted-materials. This goes for YouTube as well. The YouTube Terms of Service (https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms) clearly state that its video content can be embedded (assuming embedding is enabled) without violating the Standard YouTube License.

As mentioned in the article (above) and by Mathieu (also above), when you embed any video on your LMS and/or website, you are not actually hosting that item, so it plays from their server; hence, there is no copyright infringement.

I welcome any questions or comments.

Thank you.

Jim

[Joseph S. Clark]

This is something of a tangent, but has anyone seen policies or regulations regarding whether instructors must provide a downloadable (i.e., for offline viewing) copy of videos owned by the instructor and/or institution and hosted on the institution’s Kaltura instance (or other dedicated video hosting tool)? We had a student insist that he had “paid for the course” and so should be able to download offline copies of, say, instructor-produced lecture videos hosted in our Kaltura account.

Note that the issue is NOT whether this is possible (any uploader can enable download permissions if not locked out by account admins), nor is it about who owns the video copyright, nor is it about arguments pro and con this practice. Just about written policy/law/regulation.

Gut instinct says the student has the right to view the content while the course is running, period. I can see wanting to make a downloadable copy available to students as a matter of convenience, but I am interested in learning whether you have seen any requirement to do so documented any place.

Thanks!

Joseph S. Clark, PhD
Associate Director, Instructional Development
Office of Distance Learning
Florida State University
myweb.fsu.edu/joe

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